PD to cut staff, schedule? Its journalists think so

Plain Dealer staff are kicking off a campaign this week to counter an expected move by the paper’s owner, Advance Publications, to reduce core editorial staff and possibly change its seven days a week publishing schedule, according to this piece from the well-respected Poynter Institute.

The report by Andrew Beaujon, who writes a media column for Poynter,  begins this way:

Plain Dealer journalists plan pre-emptive campaign against reduced print, staff cuts

by Andrew BeaujonPublished Nov. 9, 2012 5:54 amUpdated Nov. 9, 2012 8:55 am

Advance Publications hasn’t said whether it intends to reduce the publication schedule or staff at The Plain Dealer, but journalists at the Cleveland paper want to get ahead of any decision their owners might make.

The Save The Plain Dealer campaign will start this weekend, Plain Dealer science writer John Mangels tells Poynter in an email.

The multi-media campaign will begin Sunday with a half-page ad in The Plain Dealer, to be followed by bus and billboard ads throughout the city. TV and radio ads will appear soon. There will be mass mailings and e-mailings to elected officials, political and business leaders and other people of influence. We’ll have a Facebook page with an abundance of content, a petition on Change.org, and a Twitter feed. We’re also working to organize community forums where we’ll discuss the future of journalism in Northeast Ohio, and the potential impact of the loss of the daily paper and much of its experienced news-gathering staff.

Advance owns a number of major market newspapers. Earlier this year it announced that The Times-Picayune of New Orleans would publish only on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. 

The Poynter piece may be found here.

Guess it's time for The Real Deal to expand.

Crossing Rubicons

Once I knew the President had won re-election, the details didn't matter. I was proud of his toughness, his grace under pressure, but mostly relieved that the nation did not succumb to the siren song of a chameleon. So I went to sleep. Sometime in the night my wife woke me just to say how splendid was Obama's victory speech. I made a mental note to listen to it later and promptly went back to sleep. It moved higher on my to-do list after I read this description by Andrew Sullivan from The Daily Beast:

The American President

"The president's oration was almost a summation of his core belief: that against the odds, human beings can actually better ourselves, morally, ethically, materially, and we can do so more powerfully together than alone, and that nowhere exemplifies that endeavor more than America. It was Lincolnian in its cadences, and in some ways, was the final, impassioned, heart-felt rebuke to all those, including his opponent, who tried to portray him as somehow un-American. How deeply that must have cut. How emphatically did he rebut the charge.

What he reminded me of was how deeply American he actually is - how this country's experiment truly is in diversity as well as democracy. And his diversity is not some cringe-worthy 1990s variety. It is about being both white and black, both mid-Western and Hawaiian, both proudly American and yet also attuned to the opinion of mankind.

…One felt something tectonic shift tonight. America crossed the Rubicon of every citizen's access to healthcare, and re-elected a black president in a truly tough economic climate. …Women, in particular, moved this nation forward - pragmatically, provisionally, sensibly. They did so alongside the young whose dedication to voting was actually greater this time than in 2008, the Latino voters who have made the current GOP irrelevant, and African-Americans, who turned up in vast numbers, as in 2008, to put a period at the end of an important sentence.

That sentence will never now be unwritten. By anyone."

To read the Sullivan piece in its entirety, including his observations about Romney's concession, go here. And I loved the picture contained in the last sentence of this column by Howard Fineman:

"… U.S. Census numbers tell the story. In the first decade of the new millennium, the Asian-American population rose 43.3 percent, the African-American population 12.3 percent, the Latino community 43 percent -- and the white population just 5.7 percent.

To be sure, the president won because of his stand on the issues -- health care reform, Wall Street regulation, the auto industry bailout, among others. But his victory is something more: a sense that we are all in this together as a society, no matter who we are or how we live our lives.

I saw this new America at the heart of the Obama reelection effort, in their campaign offices. In one office in Virgina, for example, the local campaign manager was Pakistani-American, the volunteers were of every race and background, the people heading out to handle the signup drive were Hispanic, and the event they were working on was a concert by Bruce Springsteen."

VIDEO of candidates for Cleveland NAACP president

The video of the candidates for President of the Cleveland is now online!

Take a look and then come back here and join the community dialogue about the candidates and the Cleveland NAACP.

The video runs about 22 minutes. Candidates Clint Bradley and Jocelyn Travis appear on the video in person. The third candidate, Hilton Smith, was traveling at the time this video was shot and submitted his answers in writing. They appear as he wrote and edited them.

See the video here then come back here and share your thoughts about the candidates and the Cleveland NAACP.

Early Voting at the Board of Elections

I voted this morning at the Board of Elections. This was the last day of early voting in Ohio, and the polls were open from 8AM until 2PM.

My wife and I arrived shortly after nine o’clock and the line outside the BOE building at the corner of Euclid and 30th was already around the corner and headed north about a quarter of the way towards Chester Ave. The line would grow at least half the block long before noon.

Voting at the Board is special. Many of the judicial hopefuls — I saw Cassandra Collier-Williams, Michael E. Jackson, and Cullen Sweeney — were outside greeting voters. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was there, speaking on the corner with local reporters but later inside, posing for pictures with voters and admirers.

The line was long but moved steadily. I marveled at how smoothly the process went, as the bilingual BOE employee produced my ballot for my precinct with hardly a delay. I then proceeded to an empty booth to express my views after months of listening to political ads, cable pontificators, and others.

The specialness of the occasion was in the communal expression of hundreds of people simultaneously and solemnly discharging their civic responsibility. It is a humbling and ennobling experience, an act of agency too seldom appearing in our community.

For many people moving through the line, it seemed a concerted rebuff to the insulting and outrageous claims made during what seemed a never-ending campaign, and a determined and clear response to those on a quest to suppress a significant portion of the electorate. The long lines of early voters, appearing daily for weeks, seemed like a resounding chorus of “NO YOU WON’T!”