FEATURE NO ONE’S A CRITIC
The death of thought at the Plain Dealer By Sam Allard THE PELOTON BIKE ENTHUSIAST Chris Quinn has been the editor of both Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer since June 1st. He assumed the dual mantle after The Plain Dealer News Guild was abruptly taken off life support this spring, a bloodbath we needn’t revisit in detail. Suffice it to say, a series of layoffs and tactical reassignments allowed Advance Publications, the newspaper’s parent company, to dispense with many of the region’s most skilled and dedicated journalists, drawing to a wrenching close the union-busting scheme that began in earnest with the digitalprint newsroom schism of 2013. On May 19, in the bitter aftermath of the purge, Quinn appeared before a virtual audience for a Q&A hosted by the Press Club of Cleveland. It was a rare public appearance for him. Beyond his hosting of This Week in the CLE, Cleveland.com’s daily news podcast, Quinn had not spoken publicly since the personnel changes at the PD. He certainly hadn’t spoken about those changes. Nor had he articulated his priorities for the new, so-called “unified” newsroom — another way of referring to the existing staff of Cleveland.com, plus John Caniglia (enterprise and courts), Susan Glaser (travel), Steve Litt (art and architecture), Terry Pluto (sports and faith) and Julie Washington (Covid-19 and general assignment), who’d been laid off and immediately rehired. The Zoom session was bleak. Over the course of an hour, to a sold-out digital crowd, Quinn repeatedly described journalism as a thing motivated foremost by profit. What kept him up at night, he said, was not the region’s biggest stories but Advance Local’s newest revenue models. An editor’s job was not merely overseeing news coverage, but “figuring out how to make money,” and “finding a way to the future.” Quinn is an executive speaker – he’s the kind of guy who introduces virtually every point with “Look,” – and he’s able to identify chasms and quirks of the region’s news landscape with more insight than just about anyone. He said newsroom diversity was Cleveland.com’s
biggest weakness, for example, and he correctly pegged the city of Cleveland’s looming income tax dispute with suburban residents as a major Coronavirus story for which Mayor Frank Jackson and company seemed shockingly ill-prepared. And to state the obvious: He has good reason to be preoccupied with newsroom finances in the current economic climate, in which advertising revenue has all but evaporated. But the lasting impression that evening, for me and others I spoke to, was Quinn’s commitment to his role as Advance company man. He praised the business acumen (and defended the obscene wealth) of the Newhouse Family, Advance’s notoriously anti-union founders and owners, and engaged in constant car-salesmanship of Cleveland.com’s “impact” relative to other newsrooms in town. During one answer, he synthesized his editorial vision thusly: “I don’t want to invest in content that no one is going to read.” That sounds like a sensible topline prerogative, given the way that newsrooms have had to tighten their belts and “pick their spots” due to diminished newsgathering resources. But in fact, it’s the kind of statement editors have historically risked their careers to battle against. Editors, who oversee a publication’s editorial side, tend to argue for deeper, more resourceintensive journalism across the board; while publishers, who oversee a publication’s business operations, tend to prefer ad-friendly promotional material, the low-cal stuff we now call clickbait. Probably the most durable critique of Cleveland.com under Chris Quinn is that it produces too much clickbait. It is a clickbait farm, critics have declared. While I think the characterization can be reductive and sometimes unfair, there’s no denying that the fetishization of specific engagement metrics, (i.e. clicks), has led to an explosion of lists, rankings, photo galleries and press release rewrites that dominate the website much of the day. This has happened all over the internet, by the way, not just at Cleveland.com. At national digital outlets, for a few years, the
corresponding explosion was in halfbaked hot takes. Content of this sort, which reporters hate producing just as much as readers hate consuming, is nevertheless favored by media moguls because of its high eyeballsto-manhour ratio. You can operate a bargain-basement newsroom — in business lingo, it’s called a “lean” newsroom — where poorly paid writer-curators crank out multiple blog posts per day, and an editor or editors do their best to juice them up with provocative headlines and keep them humming on Facebook, hoping some go viral. That’s what’s called a business model. But that’s not how Cleveland.com operates. For starters, it produces far more than clickbait. In fact, by virtue of its size, it covers more beats and produces more original reporting than any other outlet in town. And while the meatiest stories aren’t always prominently displayed, they can be tracked down with minimal effort. I read the digital edition of the PD most days, knowing that the best stories still almost always find their way to print. The front page of any city’s daily newspaper remains the premiere venue for local reporting. Over the past several months, I’ve been impressed with much of the newsroom’s work. The statehouse team in Columbus, with the addition of reporter Andrew Tobias, has produced a steady stream of mustread scoops on the FirstEnergy/HB6 scandal, for one. The This Week in the CLE podcast really has been a smart and lively addition to Cleveland. com’s multi-format offerings, with candid conversations about the day’s top stories from Quinn and his senior editors, Laura Johnston, Jane Kahoun and Kris Wernowsky. And reporter Cory Shaffer’s dogged pursuit of video records documenting police violence around the Cuyahoga County Justice Center on May 30 is arguably the most important work by a Cleveland journalist in 2020. But a glaring deficiency persists. It was glaring before the PD News Guild’s demise and has become more dramatic in the months since: The PD/Cleveland.com is utterly devoid of cultural criticism.
Almost unbelievably, there is no movie critic on staff anymore. There is no TV critic. There hasn’t been a full-time book critic for years. There is no theater critic. There certainly isn’t a dance critic. While there is routine coverage of the openings and closings on the action-packed Cleveland restaurant scene, there is no dining critic. The classical music writer is now freelance. There is no comedy columnist or humorist, no nightlife columnist, no gossip columnist, no “minister of culture.” There is no pop music critic. The paucity of cultural commentary is dispiriting in its own right, but also as an echo of the anemic analysis on the news desk. The only full-time Metro columnist is Leila Atassi. The Forum section – the PD’s opinion pages – consists largely of syndicated national material. Its local luminaries are a trio of semiretired old white guys: Brent Larkin to represent the “Left,” Ted Diadiun to represent the “Right,” and Thomas Suddes, from his outpost in Athens, to represent the wonks. Eric Foster, a local Black lawyer who serves as a community member on the editorial board, was conscripted into service after columnist Jarvis DeBerry’s short, impassioned stint in Northeast Ohio. This lack of locally sourced criticism and commentary shapes a news product that is flush with original reporting but absolutely allergic to original ideas. When reading the paper each morning, and certainly when trawling the website each afternoon, there is little evidence of what writer and critic Renata Adler once eloquently called “the pitch of thought.” It is content without an organizing principle, which is to say content without perspective. Ultimately, it is content without courage. An unwillingness to criticize can of course be disguised as an unwillingness to invest in content that no one reads. Indeed, it often is, which is why editors have historically risked their careers to challenge that viewpoint. They know that more often than not, what it actually signifies is cowardice, an unwillingness to offend. During the Press Club Q&A, Quinn was asked specifically about | clevescene.com | November 4-10, 2020
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