My plan this week had been to write about the suggestions some anxious and prominent Northeast Ohioans have offered us on covering the August 8 special election – along with how we have and will continue to cover it. That feels too heavy for a holiday weekend that kicks off summer, especially with the glorious weather predicted for the region. I’ll address it in the next week or two. Instead, I have news about how we’re responding to reader requests that followed our announcement earlier this year about a police blotter newsletter. In case you missed it, we created a free weekday newsletter featuring police blotters that we publish online and in the weekly Sun newspapers. People signed up in droves to get it, but we also heard from people who are disappointed that we don’t publish blotters from their communities. We have blotters only for the communities covered by the Suns, which leaves out a lot of Northeast Ohio. People love these blotters because they are about where they live. The blotters don’t generally contain murder and mayhem. Rather, they give people insights into the minor crimes and mishaps happening around the corner. Police officials generally like them, too, because blotters illustrate how police use all those taxes people pay to serve their communities. We’ve been talking for a bit about how we might add more communities, to satisfy your requests, and we think we have a path. We’re reaching out now to a bunch of police departments to arrange access. Some police departments remain old school and try to shield themselves from publicity, so we don’t know how much resistance we will encounter. High on our priority list are Mentor, Euclid and Lorain, but we hope to collect about a dozen others. The blotters are almost the opposite of the August election question in terms of substance. The election is a pivotal moment in Ohio history in which people will effectively determine whether they maintain their power to govern themselves. Compared to that, the seem like trifles - amusements. But we do aim to provide a wide array of content on our platforms, from the serious to the humorous. As we add more blotters, they will appear in the blotter newsletter. I’ve written a lot about newsletters in this space this year, because we have launched four new ones since January. In addition to the blotters, we have a new Terry Pluto newsletter, Dine Drink CLE for foodies and Travels with Susan, featuring the writing of beloved travel writer Susan Glaser What I have not mentioned of late are two of our longstanding newsletters that generate many kind letters from readers, who regularly thank us for providing them. The Wake Up is our early morning weekday newsletter containing most of what we have published in the previous 24 hours. It does not include sports, beyond some overnight scores. Nor does it include content from the Sun newspapers. It has just about everything else, and readers tell us they use it to make sure they have not missed anything important. We get it. News churns fast on our website. If you can’t check it every few hours, you can miss important headlines. The Wake Up makes sure you don’t. The other is Capitol Letter, our weekday Statehouse and Politics newsletter. It contains links to stories our reporters write as well as links to what others report, and it circulates statewide. It has become a must-read for many people with an interest in what’s happening at the Statehouse or in Ohio politicians. Producing it is a heavy lift for our Statehouse team, but readers consider it a public service. You can sign up for The Wake Up or Capitol Letter, or any of the others I’ve mentioned, at https://www.cleveland.com/newsletters.One note: The Wake Up is not publishing on the holiday, and Capitol Letter will return from the holiday weekend on Wednesday. What I find so interesting about all of these newsletters is how retro the idea of them is. We’re a digital newsroom. We publish in the moment on our website, all day long, which is quite different from the days when all we published was a print edition that came out once a day. The newsletters work more like a print edition than they do an in-the-moment platform. The readers clearly like the format, though, which is why we have added so many new ones this year. Thanks for reading. I’m at [email protected]. Thanks for reading. | 