Goldberg leaving Plain Dealer

Susan Goldberg is heading home to San Francisco. After 3 1/2 years in Cleveland, the Plain Dealer's editor announced yesterday that she's resigning Nov. 5 to join Bloomberg News as an executive editor. Managing editor Debra Adams Simmons will take over the paper's top job.

Goldberg gave the Plain Dealer a new personality, a new face. She transformed its front page with splashy centerpieces, sporty blurbs, and a relentless Cleveland focus, shoving national and world news to back pages. A glamorous figure in the newsroom, cutting across the carpet in high heels and St. John's knit suits, she also insisted on style and energy in the paper's coverage, her strategy for holding onto readers in the digital age.

But few will accuse Goldberg of softening the Plain Dealer. She steeled its spine, green-lighting aggressive coverage of patronage in Cuyahoga County government. The FBI raids vindicated the paper's stance and sparked exhaustive, banner-headline corruption coverage. Reporter Mark Puente's exposés brought down sheriff Gerald McFaul, whose corruption had been hidden or winked at for 30 years. Even our columnist Michael D. Roberts, a ferocious PD critic for years, gave Goldberg credit this September for the paper's watchdogging and its role in spurring voters to reform county government.

She'll surely be happy to leave the Don Rosenberg trial behind her. Her decision to replace Rosenberg as Cleveland Orchestra critic became a national media controversy and an ugly legal battle, raising knotty questions about how papers respond to fierce pressure from those they cover and when a writer's critical judgment becomes bias.

Home and marriage, not controversy, led to Goldberg's departure. When I profiled her two years ago, she told me her husband, real estate lawyer Geoffrey Etnire, would move to Cleveland. But he stayed in California, creating a cross-continental commuter marriage. In fact, I randomly ran into the two of them in San Francisco's Ferry Building Marketplace on a Saturday this February. She told me they owned a home nearby. Now Goldberg will reunite with her husband and walk to work at Bloomberg News' office in downtown San Francisco.

To read my profile of Goldberg, "Front Page News," click here. For Roberts' column, "Pain Dealer," click here.

Plain Dealer's circulation falls 12%, to below 300,000

The latest big-city circulation figures are out, and the Plain Dealer's decline looks dire.

Its circulation has fallen to 291,630, down from 330,280 a year ago — an 11.7% drop. That's even faster than the average newspaper's scary-enough decline of 7%.

In my January 2007 article, "The New Dealer," I wrote: "Many more ad dollars are leaving the paper than readers. Unlike people in Web-savvier cities, we’re not abandoning the newspaper for online news." Not so today.

I can see a few plausible explanations for the steep decline.

1) Perhaps the Plain Dealer's readers are just going to cleveland.com. Editor Susan Goldberg told an audience of Cleveland State students this February that the web site's readership has doubled since 2004. As of late 2007, cleveland.com had a readership of about 1.2 million unique users a month, up from about 1 million a year earlier.

2) Maybe people are canceling subscriptions to save money during the recession.

3) Some newspapers these days are deliberately stopping circulation in areas far away from their home city and expensive to deliver to.

4) Perhaps, as the paper gets smaller, a vicious cycle kicks in: people cancel, thinking they're not getting their money's worth anymore.

We'll see if the Plain Dealer covers its own circulation decline in tomorrow's paper. They've been making a point of commenting on news about themselves lately, instead of leaving it to others. For now, cleveland.com just has a wire-service story about the new numbers.

Plain Dealer to cut more news staff

The Plain Dealer is cutting even more news staff, it announced yesterday. It'll have 260 newsroom employees by years' end, down from 372 two years ago -- a 30 percent cut. Publisher Terry Egger says the paper's profit is much smaller than expected because of declining ad revenue.

If 38 employees don't leave by Nov. 20, the PD will lay people off -- a step Egger used to dismiss as alien to the company's culture.

The paper is offering two weeks' severance pay for every year an employee has worked there, but no health coverage. That's a less attractive offer than in 2006, when younger and non-veteran employees who left got the same severance pay plus benefits, while workers over age 50 with 20 years at the paper got a generous buyout: 2 1/2 years' salary and benefits.

Some links to our coverage of the Plain Dealer:
-Mike Roberts' September column on what Cleveland loses as the paper shrinks
-our July critique of the PD's new, smaller redesign
-my March profile of editor Susan Goldberg
-my January 2007 article "The New Dealer," which described the state of the PD as it began adjusting to the Internet era