Cliff Pinckard jokes that his existence is a rumor in our newsroom. There’s evidence of him, but sightings are rare.
That’s how it has to be when you’re the lone guy working an overnight shift, on a schedule completely out of sync with colleagues. He starts work about the time many are going to bed and wraps up as we rise.
I want to tell you a bit about Cliff because he’s so vital to our operation -- and to your being able to wake up in the morning, glance at your phone and be caught up on all of the news of the previous day, including from while you were sleeping.
He keeps track of any breaking local news overnight, publishes wire stories about big national or international news and polishes off our first-read-of-the-morning newsletter, The Wake Up. We see him in the newsroom once or twice a year, for various gatherings, but his presence is constant through what he publishes on our website. Year in and year out, he ranks high in the newsroom for how much his content is read.
I find Cliff a godsend and worry what we will do if he ever asks to get off the night shift. But he tells me it suits him.
He says he does not get lonely but sometimes misses face-to-face interaction with colleagues. Being able to bounce ideas off of colleagues occasionally would be helpful, but he says he focuses better and works more quickly on his own. The pandemic gave his co-workers better insight into Cliff’s work, as they all suddenly were working solo in their homes. Many of us did not adjust as cleanly as Cliff has.
Cliff has a long history as a night owl. In college, he worked on a third-shift cleanup crew at a Campbell’s Soup plant in the summers. He joined the sports copy desk at The Plain Dealer in 1999 – a night job. He spent one year on the features desk in 2005, but he preferred sports. He’s been working nights since 2009 except for one 10-month break a decade ago.
His nightly routine begins with any local stories that need finishing. If news breaks after the early evening, it falls to Cliff to report and publish it. Next, he combs through a series of resources for anything of note happening around the state that has a local connection and writes that up. He drops everything if a big story breaks anywhere in the world, but that’s not common.
Once he’s got a handle on the news, he turns to The Wake Up. (You can subscribe for free at cleveland.com/newsletters) The day team puts together the early draft, with a list of the news stories we’ve reported that day, but Cliff is the closer. He adds anything that is missing or happened after 5 p.m., proofreads it and gets it ready to be in your email box when you awake.
The rest of his shift is looking for news that is simply interesting. Maybe it is the release by animal activists of thousands of minks into the wild. Maybe it is an explosion on the other side of the world. He says the two biggest stories to break locally while he was working overnight were both fires, one in 2015 that destroyed the Madison Country Club in Lake County and one in 2016 that killed a family of four in Northfield Center Township. For stories like those, he jumps in the car and gets to the scene.
As for big national news, Cliff was the guy publishing news on our site about the 2012 shooting at a cinema in Aurora, Colorado and the 2017 massacre at a music festival in Las Vegas.
When does he sleep? He aims for 7 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., with an occasional nap before he starts work. He and his wife see each other throughout their afternoons and early evenings, and before his daughters grew up and left home, Cliff was there when they arrived home from school. He also was awake when they left for school.
He’s an avid runner, so the schedule works well for training but not so much for races. He told me has run half-marathons after working all night but would not attempt that again.
The truth is, Cliff never stops running. He’s part of the backbone of our newsroom, making sure you are up-to-date to start your day.
Thanks for reading.
