Laid-off Plain Dealer staffers, half volunteers, half not, drink at Irish wake

Last night, after word went out that The Plain Dealer’s newsroom layoffs would come today, Ellen Jan Kleinerman stayed late to finish her article, knowing it might be her last.

At 8 p.m., the medical reporter scheduled her story to post on Cleveland.com. It went online this morning at 6 a.m. Four hours later, she and about 44 other journalists were out of a job.

“I was in mourning for my career, for my colleagues, and for journalism in general,” Kleinerman said tonight on the patio of the Market Garden Brewery, where dozens of Plain Dealer reporters gathered for what was dubbed an Irish wake. “The way we cover news is changing. I’m all for change, but I’m not sure I’m embracing the type of change that’s going to come.”

The Plain Dealer slashed its unionized newsroom staff by 30 percent today, part of its switch to a digital-first news strategy and its cutback to a four-day home delivery schedule next week.

About half of the laid-off journalists volunteered to go. Harlan Spector, head of the Newspaper Guild local, and John Mangels, leader of the union’s Save The Plain Dealer campaign, asked to be put on the layoff list. So did columnists Regina Brett and Margaret Bernstein.

For those who chose to leave, the layoff amounts to a generous buyout – a union-guaranteed two weeks’ pay for every year worked. It’s also a chance to save someone else’s job while opting out of Advance Publications’ digital future.

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” said Spector, a 32-year journalist and 23-year PD veteran, after the Guild’s 6 pm rally outside the Plain Dealer offices. “I never thought I’d leave the business. But the way things are going here, I didn’t think I’d get to practice journalism the way I and many others have practiced it.”

The new way is speed and clicks, not ink. Managers are telling PD reporters to think of themselves as working for a website, not a newspaper, one staffer said. While they post news as it happens, a new team of curators will decide which Cleveland.com stories make it to print.

The changes concern Kleinerman, who says editors seem focused on attracting hits, not a story’s value to the community. She fears the PD’s remaining journalists won’t have time to chase unsexy stories that drive change, like her 2009 series about the Cleveland water division’s plague of broken meters, outrageous over-billing and hour-long call times.

“I’ve been in journalism 30 years,” she said. “I love writing. I love the mission. It’s very fulfilling when you do a story and you know that you’ve informed readers and changed lives.”

For 110 journalists and a few dozen nonunion editors, that work goes on. Today -- as if to signal the new regime will support in-depth projects -- Cleveland.com previewed a digital-first investigative series on DNA testing of old rape kits. It’s set to debut Monday, the first day with no home-delivered Plain Dealer. Rachel Dissell, a reporter on the project, says some elements will also run in the paper, but a few, such as an interactive digital timeline, won’t fit a print format.

Tomorrow, Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer will cover Ariel Castro’s sentencing, the finale to the city’s biggest story of the year. It could be a morale boost for the slimmed-down staff – or, at least, a way to work through survivor’s guilt.

Plain Dealer going to 3-day home delivery, 7-day newsstand edition

The Plain Dealer has announced its big change, and it’s not what most people expected. The paper will cut home delivery to 3* days a week starting in late summer. But it’ll continue publishing a 7-day paper at newsstands and in an electronic edition. [*see update at bottom]

The move, announced this morning, is part of PD owner Advance Publications’ aggressive shift toward a digital-first publishing strategy. But it’ll play out differently in Cleveland than in other cities where Advance owns newspapers. From New Orleans to Harrisburg, Pa., Advance papers have given up on daily print publication in the past several months.

Instead, The Plain Dealer is adopting a strategy pioneered by the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News, which reduced home delivery to three days a week in 2009 to cut printing and delivery costs. The PD says it’ll deliver papers to homes on Sundays and two other days to be named later.

The head of The Plain Dealer’s newsroom union, which tried to rally Greater Cleveland against a reduction in the paper’s print schedule, reacted to the news with a mix of guarded relief and continued alarm.

“We’re pleased the paper decided to maintain 7-days-a-week publication,” said Harlan Spector, chairman of the Newspaper Guild’s Local 1. “It perhaps shows that they were listening to the community. However, we still have grave concerns about he staff cuts, the quality of journalism that’s going to be offered with this reduced staff, and the folks that are going to lose out from lack of home delivery four days a week.”

Today’s announcement did not say how much the news-gathering operation will shrink. Staffing decisions will be made this summer, PD publisher Terry Egger said in a press release.

In December, the Guild reluctantly agreed to management’s plan to reduce The Plain Dealer’s news staff from 168 people to 110. But not all of those cuts will be layoffs. Some staffers will be offered jobs with cleveland.com, management told the union at the time. Today’s announcement says news content will be provided by both the Plain Dealer Publishing Company and a reorganized digital operation, the Northeast Ohio Media Group.

Terry Egger, the Plain Dealer’s publisher, will stay to see the paper through the changes. Last September, Egger announced plans to retire this Jan. 1, triggering fears among the staff that the paper was about to become a non-daily. But in December, Egger revealed he was putting off his retirement to work on the transition. Now he plans to leave at the end of 2013.

{Update: Egger and other PD executives lobbied Advance to keep the paper a daily. "We think that's a must in this marketplace, and we were listened to on this point," Egger told newsroom employees, according to Robert L. Smith's article.}

The announcement did not reveal what the newsstand-only editions will look like. In Detroit, smaller, redesigned print editions were rolled out with the switch to 3-day home delivery. Another development in Detroit has cushioned the blow for devoted newspaper readers. Independent distributors have filled the gap, delivering print editions every day to some homes.

The paper broke the news online at about 10 am today, sparking a flood of comments from readers upset about the changes. Plain Dealer managing editor Thomas Fladung and other employees jumped in with responses.

“We will still have staff reductions,” Fladung wrote. “That stinks, but it's dictated by the continuing struggles my industry faces.”

Optimistically, Fladung pitched the changes as a strategy for bouncing back in the long run. “We have to find a way to break out of this cycle of cuts and find the approaches and the products that will again allow us to grow.”

Advance's digital-first strategy has proven controversial in cities where it's been implemented. Critics say its websites are poorly designed and don't live up to the company's digital ambitions. Meanwhile, most newspaper companies are taking a different strategy, erecting paywalls on their websites to shift away from a free-news model.

"Compared with decisions by other owners, [Advance's strategy] looks like an unnecessary and premature surrender of the qualities that make newsrooms worth having—and saving," argued Ryan Chittum in the Columbia Journalism Review in March.

Chittum's story on the changes at the New Orleans Times-Picyaune and its website, NOLA.com, asserted that the quality of news coverage has declined as the New Orleans operation shifts its focus to sports and entertainment.

*Update: The Plain Dealer will be home-delivered 4 days a week, not 3, the paper announced on May 22. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, the paper will be sold only on newsstands. The changes will debut August 5. The paper's announcement was hard to follow; see this Crain's Cleveland Business story for a clear explanation.

Forum on Plain Dealer's future turns to thoughts of competition

The most intriguing question at this week’s Ohio City Writers forum on the Plain Dealer’s future wasn’t the Plain Dealer’s future. Most panelists seemed resigned to the fact that the paper will shrink this spring by cutting a third of its news staff. Instead, the talk became a brainstorming session on how nonprofit and for-profit startups might rise up to fill the growing holes in Cleveland news coverage.

“[Will] the Plain Dealer be vulnerable to competition?” asked moderator Dan Moulthrop of the Civic Commons. Perhaps, he suggested, the 58 journalists the paper's owner plans to cut from the newsroom after May 1 “could start a new news organization for the city.”

The Tuesday talk at the Happy Dog was the second time in a week that a West Side bar became a forum for heated talk about layoffs and seven-day publication at Cleveland’s daily paper. But the vibe Tuesday night was far different than at the newsroom union’s 7-Day Lager party last week.

Rachel Dissell, PD reporter and a leader of the Newspaper Guild's Save the Plain Dealer campaign, shared the stage with a skeptical panel that reflected Cleveland’s changing media landscape, including a moderator from a civic-journalism website, a politician-blogger and two former newspaper reporters gone digital. Some panelists, such as Pepper Pike city councilwoman Jill Miller Zimon, said they’ve become platform-agnostic, reading news both in print and online.

At first, the talk became a debate of sorts between Dissell and Angie Schmitt, a co-founder of the website Rust Wire who’s written critically about the Save the PD effort.

“It’s really a shame to see anyone laid off,” said Schmitt, who was laid off from the Toledo Blade four years ago. “But the reliance on print makes layoffs inevitable as print declines.”

“Does it take fewer people to ask questions and report stories for a 24-hour website than it does for a seven-day newspaper?” Dissell shot back.

Layoffs are business decisions, Schmitt replied. The web is “where you’re going to see growth in the media in the future.”

Online news is a “really tough business,” added Schmitt, a writer for the nonprofit Streetsblog, but “in some ways, it can be good for consumers, because there’s a really direct way to tell how your stories are being received and what people value.”

That defense of click-driven journalism alarmed Dissell. “On cleveland.com, the stories that get the most hits are the ones with the words, ‘Free,’ ‘Naked,’ and ‘Browns’ in them,” she replied.

Dissell recalled her work researching and writing mini-bios of 136 figures connected to the Cuyahoga County corruption investigation. Who else besides the Plain Dealer has the resources to do such a thing? she asked.

Halfway through, the talk turned on Moulthrop’s question: would a smaller PD face new competition? Schmitt said it would open up opportunities for journalism entrepreneurs.

“In Seattle, somebody told me, every single neighborhood has a hyperlocal blog that’s supporting a full- or part-time journalist,” Schmitt said. “In Cleveland, I think our new media landscape hasn’t been evolving the way you’d expect it to. It’s lagging behind places like Columbus and Toledo.”

Dissell said Patch.com, a leader in neighborhood coverage, hasn’t figured out how to be profitable. Maybe a nonprofit news organization will have to fill the gap, she said.

Two other panelists, freelancer Afi-Odelia Scruggs and Thor Wasbotten, director of Kent State’s journalism school, debated whether crowd-funding can pay for investigative reporting. Scruggs said it seems to work best when crowd-funded journalists partner with established news organizations. Dissell said the Save the Plain Dealer campaign was looking into partnerships with nonprofits to cover areas the staff most wants to cover.

Wasbotten recommended journalist entrepreneurs approach the Knight Foundation, which has roots in Northeast Ohio. “They’re looking for great ideas,” he said.

All the talk of webby innovation brought Dissell back to the union’s frustrations with Advance, the Plain Dealer’s parent company. “We have no control over almost any of the website,” she says. “We can’t create our own apps. We can’t put out our own iPad version every day.” She once suggested creating digital news-alert notifications and was told the company wouldn’t allow it.

“If you go to the company with an idea and say, ‘I really think we need to do this online,’ you get radio silence,” she said.

Panelists kept returning to the main irony of Advance’s moves in Cleveland and elsewhere: It’s pursuing a digital-first strategy, but doesn’t create first-rate websites. That makes its risky bet even riskier.

“Go find the Advance Publications site,” Scruggs told the smartphone users in the audience. “When you look at that site, I want you to answer this question: Why do we expect them to do for us what they aren’t doing for themselves?”

Update, 12/17: You can listen to the forum here.

Plain Dealer union members drink 7-Day Lager, mull bitter agreement

Market Garden Brewery’s 7-Day Lager, brewed in honor of the Save the Plain Dealer campaign, is crisp and blond, light for a craft beer.

“Only four percent alcohol, so you can drink seven in one day,” joked PD theater critic Andrea Simakis.

The beer menu just says “best when enjoyed daily.” But it’s understandable if some of the paper’s journalists wanted to drink more.

Three hours before their party last night at Market Garden’s basement bar, they’d learned the details of their union’s new agreement with Plain Dealer management. It sets the terms of the newsroom’s downsizing next year from 168 journalists to 110. And it made the party an uneasy brew of sad resignation, festive camaraderie, and sarcastic anger.

“We’ve got a special guest,” Plain Dealer science reporter John Mangels announced at the mike. “I’m sure he’s here somewhere. Steve Newhouse, are you here?”

Scattered boos greeted the name of the digital division chairman of Advance, which owns the PD and has converted several daily papers to three-day-a-week publications. Last month, Newhouse dismissed the union’s Save the Plain Dealer campaign by saying the chain’s decisions would be based on industry trends, not sentiment.

Mangels, who’s heading the campaign, pulled a Clint Eastwood, talking to a green chair as if it were Newhouse. He mocked Advance’s digital-first strategy and the quality of Cleveland.com, the PD’s online platform.

“Steve’s blazing trails in the digital world,” Mangels said, but Cleveland.com "takes a little while to load.” Advance has rebranded online reporters and editors as “content providers” and “curators,” Mangels said. "We are going to rebrand Steve,” he announced. “The first person who can do that without using the F-word gets a seven-day supply of 7-Day Lager.”

The proposed labor agreement signals that Advance does not plan to merge the Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com into a single “media group,” as it has done in other cities. Instead, the company will run parallel news operations in Cleveland: a shrinking unionized newsroom and a new, nonunion digital news staff.

Under the new agreement, nonunion Cleveland.com journalists will be able to write for the Plain Dealer, while Plain Dealer reporters’ work will still go online. It’s a major concession by the Newspaper Guild, and it’ll weaken the union over time, since new hires will likely be on the online side.

In exchange, the company will extend the Guild’s contract from 2014 to 2019, restore the 8 percent wage cut the journalists took to avoid layoffs in 2009, and add money to the Guild’s underfunded pension and health care funds. The paper also put a floor on its layoff plans. After the cut from 168 to 110 staffers sometime after May 1, it’ll only carry out one more downsizing, to 105 in 2014, in the next six years.

“After the massacre of 2013, we wanted a guarantee for people,” explained Harlan Spector, president of the Guild local.

The union votes on the agreement Tuesday. If it says no, Spector says management has vowed to cut 80 to 85 newsroom jobs in 2013 instead of 58 and reopen the existing contract’s economic provisions to take the health care and pension fund money out of the journalists’ wages.

“It’s not much of a choice: a bad option and a worse option,” said John Horton, who writes the PD’s Road Rant column for commuters. Horton said he’d grudgingly vote for the agreement. “You see what we have – it’s being dismantled. You’re losing something. You won’t realize it until it’s gone.”

Spector said the agreement hasn’t weakened the Guild’s resolve to press on with the campaign, which has attracted 6,700 supporters on an online petition. “We’re going to stand up for the community and what they want, a seven-day newspaper and a news staff that has some teeth,” he said.

The party, in the brightly wood-paneled basement of one of Cleveland’s most buzzed-about bars, was packed with current and former PD journalists and supporters of the Save the Plain Dealer campaign. The crowd included a few civic leaders, but not nearly enough to stage the citywide revolt the Guild has been hoping for.

Dave Abbott, executive director of the George Gund Foundation, drank a 7-Day Lager at the bar. “It’s a lighter beer than I normally like, but I’m drinking it out of a sense of loyalty,” said Abbott, who came to Cleveland to work at the Plain Dealer from 1975 to 1979.

Abbott said he thinks Cleveland.com is a poor substitute for the print edition. “Their online platform is unappetizing, confusing, and inaccessible.” He feared a cut in the PD’s print schedule would hurt the community. “A daily newspaper is a primary source of civic journalism, analysis of issues,” he said.

Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald weaved through the crowd as reporters thanked him for his support. He said losing a daily would hurt the community’s growth and its political culture.

“Cleveland is on an upswing in a lot of ways,” FitzGerald said. “This is exactly the wrong time to become the largest metro area that’s not going to have a daily newspaper. We’ve got a good story to tell, a lot of vibrancy right now. I think we need a seven-day paper and all the reporting ability that goes along with it to build on that.”

Full-time reporting on politics is a “necessary ingredient of democracy,” FitzGerald argued. Without it, politics “really gets dumbed down.”

How are other civic leaders responding to the campaign? “I don’t think they’re as motivated as they should be,” FitzGerald said. The PD’s reporting has made enemies in town. “A lot of it, in my conversations with them, is based on the fact that they might have a personal grievance against the coverage of the Plain Dealer. It’s understandable, but I think it’s short-sighted.”

At the mike, singer-songwriter Alex Bevan performed “Ink on Paper,” a lively blues he wrote for the campaign:

The times are changing
You know that’s a fact
When a good thing is done
You just can’t get it back
I want my paper to stay

Sam McNulty, Market Garden’s owner, expressed solidarity with the journalists while anticipating next year’s layoffs.

“I’ve got two thoughts,” McNulty said. “One is, we’re going to win this. The second thought is, in case we don’t, Plan B is, when you walk out, bring everything you have, your Rolodex, all your contacts. There’ll be a small office somewhere where we can start all over again.”

Update, 7 pm: Videos from the event are online here.

Tough choices ahead for Plain Dealer staffers as 35% cuts loom

Even as The Plain Dealer’s journalists mount a campaign to keep the newspaper a daily, they’ll soon face wrenching choices.

The paper’s owner wants to reach an agreement with the newsroom union over how management will go about cutting the news staff by 35 percent and shifting its Cleveland operations to focus more on digital news.

Will the union accept an agreement, even though the journalists feel those cuts will devastate the newsroom and may be a prelude to publishing only three days a week? Or, if they say no, will they risk cuts to their pay and even deeper layoffs?

That’s the question I’m reading between the lines of the news trickling out of the newsroom union’s negotiations with Plain Dealer management.

Newspaper Guild officials revealed this week that the paper’s owner, Advance Publications, intends to cut the unionized newsroom staff — reporters, photographers, designers and mid-level editors — from 168 people to 110 on or after May 1.

Company negotiators haven’t talked about the paper’s future print schedule, except to say it isn’t part of the negotiations, says Harlan Spector, chairman of the union local.

“It’s certainly not a good sign as far as maintaining a seven-day publication schedule,” Spector says. “It doesn’t look good, but we’re still hopeful that the management of Advance is going to maintain a daily newspaper.”

Advance has already slashed its dailies in New Orleans and Alabama down to three-day-a-week newspapers and laid off 48 to 60 percent of the staff. Its papers in Syracuse, N.Y. and Harrisburg, Pa. are making the change in the new year. Staffers here fear the same fate is in store for The Plain Dealer.

Company officials have said only that its Cleveland operations will shift to stress online news more. That goal is the same as it’s expressed in other cities. But the shift will look different here. The Plain Dealer is Advance’s only paper with a newsroom union, and labor law and the Guild contract may be limiting its options.

In other cities, Advance merged its newspaper and online operations into a single “media group.” Here, the company seems to be planning to keep the operations separate, but cut print staff and increase digital staff. The company has offered to shrink the newsroom by a combination of layoffs and re-hires of some newsroom employees at the nonunion cleveland.com.

“One of things being discussed is the May 1 layoff date,” Spector says. “We anticipate job offers for cleveland.com, job interviews, the whole process, being earlier than that.”

That seems designed to give the company maximum leverage over current staffers, forcing them into tough choices. The company could entice its newsroom stars to move to cleveland.com with offers of higher pay. Or it could tell some staffers they’ll be on the layoff list if they don’t accept an online job offer. Or it could leave them in the dark, so that if they turn down a cleveland.com offer, they’ll risk being laid off.

The new online jobs may well be like those in these ads for Advance’s Syracuse and Harrisburg media groups: a blend of traditional beat reporting with intense social media engagement.

It’ll be painful for the union to agree to a downsizing plan like this one, especially one so at odds with the goals of its Save the Plain Dealer campaign. John Mangels, chairman of the campaign, says reports from cities where Advance has implemented its strategy show the quality of news has declined.

“It’s not as comprehensive, not as deep, not as edited, has mistakes,” Mangels says. “That’s the kind of preview you’re getting, unfortunately, of what you’ll be seeing in Cleveland if this goes forward as we think it will.” Veteran reporters have been laid off or declined to join the new media groups, he says. “The inexperience of the reporters left there shows through.”

So the Save the Plain Dealer campaign is pressing on. “There has not been a publicly announced of number of days we are going to publish yet,” Mangels says. “We take this as a good sign. We can still have an impact on that decision. Because the layoffs have not happened yet, we believe we can still have an impact on that.”

But even as it resists the layoffs, the Guild may soon have to decide whether to agree on how they’ll be implemented. Its members have a lot at stake.

They accepted pay cuts in 2009 in exchange for a no-layoffs pledge that expires Jan. 31. So the remaining staffers should a bump back up in pay once layoffs happen. But if the union rejects a new agreement, another deadline looms. Starting Jan. 31, the company can also exercise an option in the Guild contract to request an “economic reopener” and try to renegotiate wages and benefits downward.

“If these talks don’t result in some sort of agreement, that’s possible,” Spector says.

The company and union are discussing whether to extend the Guild’s current contract, which expires in February 2014, into 2019.  So if the union turns down an agreement, its members could end up with even less job security. Advance’s offer to hire current staff for online jobs could disappear. Possibly even its plan to keep 110 Guild members could change.

So the journalists are facing two bad choices. Even as they work to create a region-wide debate over the paper’s fate, the company is reminding them of how little control they have.

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.

It's "Ky-ah-HO-ga" -- the Mohawk say so

Did you see Cleveland Magazine mentioned on the Plain Dealer's front page yesterday? Mike McIntyre, the Tipoff columnist, credited us with a friendly assist as he tried to settle Cleveland's eternal debate: whether the river and the county should be pronounced "Ky-ah-HO-ga" or "Ky-ah-HOG-ah."

McIntyre covers the main points: that West Siders tend to prefer "HOG-ah," while East Siders say "HO-ga." He credited Jimmy Dimora with endorsing "HOG-ah" last week. (During his "diatribe" -- Dimora's own description -- against county Republican leader Rob Frost, my notes show Dimora also reduced the name to three, almost two, syllables: "Ka'HOG-ah" County.)

McIntyre writes, "Cleveland Magazine declared hoag correct after once interviewing a woman who speaks Mohawk. Cuyahoga is derived from an American Indian word." I had tipped him off to one of my proudest discoveries of Cleveland-iana, which we published in our December 2005 "How Cleveland Are You?" quiz:
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The most poetic legend claims Cuyahoga is a Mohawk word for “crooked river.” So we called someone who speaks Mohawk: Martha Lickers, curriculum developer at the Ronathahonni Cultural Center in Ahkwesahsne, Ont. The Mohawk word for “big river,” she says, is kahionhowanen, which is pronounced “gah-yo-ho-wah-na.” HO-ga it is.
--
Gah-yo-ho-wah = Ky-ah-ho-gah. That not only settles the HO-ga vs. HOG-ah debate, it identifies the origin of the river's name! Alas, it's not "crooked river," as the poetic legend goes, just "big river."

No wonder our discovery didn't catch on. The idea that the name means "crooked river" is one of those Cleveland myths we don't want to let go -- like the legend that the bullet holes in Great Lakes Brewing's bar were shot by Eliot Ness.

Speaking of the river: "Burn On," our complete package of stories about the 40th anniversary of the Cuyahoga River Fire, is now online. It's also in the July issue of the magazine. (If you'd like to link to it, here's a shortcut: tinyurl.com/CMriverpackage.)

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.

How negative was the Plain Dealer to The Cleveland Orchestra music director?

My April piece Critical Sinking — a close look at the conflict between The Cleveland Orchestra, the Plain Dealer and critic Donald Rosenberg which lead to the reassignment of a highly skilled music critic who covered one of the best musical institutions in the world — prompted a letter asking for more details.

I read your recent article "Critical Sinking" with great interest. I thought it was fairly balanced, however, one paragraph left me wanting more.

On page 73 the article states: "For the meeting, Julie Clark, working for the orchestra’s media relations department, assembled a point-by-point critique of all 150 sentences Rosenberg had written about Welser-Möst, from his guest-conducting performance on Feb. 12, 1993, to the latest concert before the meeting. She rated each sentence as “positive,” “mixed” or “negative."

I wonder if other readers had the same reaction as me. I would have liked to know the results of that critique. Did the research show a predominant slant to these sentences or not? Why was the result of that study not revealed? Was the information denied to you, not requested or merely not pursued.

For those interested, I've scanned the chart described in the story. Each X represents an individual sentence. So for each article Rosenberg penned about a Welser-Möst-led performance, there may be several Xs under each category.

Egger: PD will remain a daily

Plain Dealer publisher Terry Egger told employees today that the paper will continue to publish as a daily -- even as the PD's parent company, Advance Publications, slashes some of its Michigan newspapers to three and two days a week.

"As soon as you do that, game over," Egger said, according to this cleveland.com post.

I agree. Two weeks ago, while I was debunking the Web speculation that the PD would close, I wondered whether Egger would have to look at the model Detroit's dailies are turning to. They're cutting home delivery to three days a week and publishing newsstand-only mini-papers the rest of the week.

The PD's parent company looked at the Detroit model and went further with four of its Michigan papers. The Ann Arbor News is closing, to be replaced by a website that'll put out a twice-weekly print edition. The Saginaw News, Flint Journal and Bay City Times are going to three days a week.

But Egger's reaction to that idea is a forceful no. (He delivered it as he announced reductions in pay and work days for non-union staff.) I think his "game over" line means: the people who loyally read the paper daily over breakfast are your core audience, the last readers you want to give up on.

I agree. Egger's insistence that the PD will remain a daily (read: as long as he's in charge) should reassure anyone who cares about Cleveland journalism.

p.s.: Egger is speaking at Old Stone Church on Public Square at lunchtime Wednesday. I'm sure he'll get lots of questions about the PD's future.

PD to close? Not so fast

Maybe you saw the prediction that the Plain Dealer will close or go digital-only. It swept across Cleveland blogs and inboxes this week, and the PD responded with this article, calling the prediction "baseless."

The prediction seems pretty weak. It's speculation based on two facts: 1) Cleveland is struggling economically. 2) The chain that owns the PD threatened to close its paper in Newark, but backed off.

I'll concede the first point. But the Newark Star-Ledger was on track to lose $40 million last year. The PD is still in the black, editor Susan Goldberg said at her City Club talk last month.

However, the PD's response is also weak. Most of it was spent pointing out that the doomsday prediction comes from the financial blog 24/7 Wall St., not Time, though the article appears on Time.com because of an online partnership.

The comments from Publisher Terry Egger (pictured) on the paper's health did not reassure me much (emphasis mine):

Egger said that newspapers are having financial difficulties, but The Plain Dealer made money in 2008. Though it laid off a significant number of employees late last year, Egger said, the paper budgeted to make money in 2009.

Egger said The Plain Dealer and its parent corporation, Advance Publications, remain committed to producing news both in print and online. "Every plan we have for the immediate future is to make that work," he said.

I doubt the PD will fold or go all-digital. It'll just lay off more employees if goes into the red. But the doomsday prediction reminded me of a less drastic but still alarming option.

The Detroit News -- another paper on 24/7's doomsday list -- and Detroit Free Press are cutting back on home delivery, going down to only three days a week starting this spring.

Some days of a newspaper attract way more ads than others. Sunday papers are huge, while Monday and Tuesday papers are tiny. The Detroit papers are going to deliver only the lucrative editions, and send readers online or to newsstands for 32-page mini-papers the other four days a week.

I couldn't help but notice that Egger's denial was published in a Tuesday print edition that included a 6-page A section and 6-page B section. If ad sales keep falling, there is not much left to cut on Tuesdays.

I don't want to predict that the Plain Dealer will eventually adopt Detroit's strategy. It seems like a great way to alienate your core audience (the read-my-paper-with-breakfast crowd), and there is plenty of news to report on your average Tuesday. But if the paper's ad base keeps shrinking, I have to imagine they're at least going to look at the Detroit model.

Update: This New York Times article considers the possibility that some cities might soon be left without a newspaper, but it doesn't name names.

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