COMMENTARY | Cleveland's Media Ecosystem

Local Media: a Place for Your Interests, Your Perspective, and Your Voice

by Rich Weiss and R. T. Andrews

The proliferation of fake news in concept and fact has eroded the most important asset any media outlet has: its readers’  trust.

In February, 2020, along with warning of the Coronavirus-19 (2019-nCoV) pandemic, the World Health Organization warned: “The 2019-nCoV outbreak and response has been accompanied by a massive ‘infodemic’ — an overabundance of information – some accurate and some not — that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.”

Now, more than ever, informed and engaged communities are essential for a healthy democracy. Not just for conservatives, or liberals, or independents, but across the board.

A Pew Research study conducted from 2016 to 2017 found “Americans express only a moderate trust in most news source types.” That same study revealed an increase in the number of respondents who trust information from their own local news organization. This increase outpaced trust of information from sources of national news, friends, and family.

in local media we see our faces and the faces of our community members.  We see news and events happening in our own communities.  We see marketing and advertising from our own mom-and-pop shops.  We see our own interests.

What do we see in local media that engenders our trust?  We see our faces and the faces of our community members. We see news and events happening in our own communities. We see marketing and advertising from our own mom-and-pop shops. We see our own interests.

But in Cleveland, our local media ecosystem is in need just as research is beginning to show the degree to which our local media ecosystem is needed by our community. Within this local media ecosystem, we have varying degrees of difficulty producing uniquely local content, upgrading equipment and technology, keeping up with current media trends, and hiring staff. Community media deserts stretch across vast areas of our town that have languished for decades without their own voice, leaving clusters of communities underserved and underreported.

Can we afford to turn a blind eye as our trusted neighborhood and community media outlets age and shutter? Should we cede the information of our local communities to the continued growth of big tech, social media, and cable news? How do we justify neglecting our local media outlets just when studies show their ability to grow the very thing slipping through the fingers of less localized media: reader trust?

Why do media outlets come around in the first place? The Cleveland Gazette and Commercial Register was Cleveland’s first newspaper, but it had the same reason for coming into existence as all media outlets: we need them. We need them because our neighborhoods become safer when neighbors know more about each other. We need them because we seek the collective identity a local media outlet develops. We need them in order to learn about new organizations doing work for, or services being offered by, our communities. We need them because our communities rely on our local media to bring us together in good times and bad.

The further away the source of our community’s information, the less responsive that source is to our community’s needs.

Do we want a society that slouches into a dependence on information from the most virtual, the most fleeting, the most distant, the most faceless sources? Where our connection to our source of information is as distant as we are to the nearest orbiting satellite? What does that imaginary neighborhood look like? Close your eyes —really picture it for just a moment.

With no local media remaining, do you see non-local media outlets serving the interests of communities, or do you see communities serving the interests of non-local media outlets?  In this future, do small mom-and-pop businesses open and thrive, or are there big-box mega-stores as far as the eye can see? When one community member is wronged, does she or he have a voice, or is that community member resigned to accept the circumstance? Do the rest of us rally to his or her defense, or do we pull our window shades and hope never to meet the same fate ourselves?

Can we picture another future?

Might this combined Coronavirus-19 pandemic/infodemic, and the fear and confusion that is accompanying the loss of friends and family, force us to rededicate ourselves to a healthy local media ecosphere on which we depend? 

Could 2020, the Year of Our Quarantine, be the year we stopped rolling our eyes about local media and started rolling up our sleeves instead? 

Outbreaks of this deadly virus in the smallest of communities means inevitable viral outbreaks for us all. Should we likewise acknowledge that communities lacking trusted information — by and for their own community — make for a less healthy democracy for us all?

We believe so. 

We call on all citizens to support efforts like our Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland and Neighborhood Media Foundation to strengthen existing community media serving Cleveland’s neighborhoods; to foster new media outlets in underserved neighborhoods; to find funding and expertise to overcome fledgling community media obstacles; and together, to build networks of assistance and collaboration between a constellation of independent media outlets throughout Northeast Ohio, representing the many voices of our richly diverse Cleveland communities.

Local media help us develop and reflect a collective identity around which we rally in good times and bad.

We are proud to be publishers of local media in Cleveland. We are proud to work collaboratively  with 14 associated Cleveland-area media outlets to deliver higher quality information to our panorama of diverse, unique, independent Cleveland communities. Our media outlets have fought for the interests of your communities for years. In the grips of this pandemic/infodemic and its impact on every aspect of life, we ask you to fight for your own local, neighborhood, or community information source in some very specific ways: subscribe, like and follow us on social media, and share us widely with your networks. Advertise with us; encourage the merchants with whom you do business to do likewise. 

When you take these actions, you are fighting for a place for your own interests, your own perspective, and your own voice. You are being active agents in the salvation of your own communities.

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Rich Weiss is Publisher of The Tremonster, and Vice President of Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland.  He is Executive Director of Neighborhood Media Foundation, a nonprofit that supports media produced by and for Cleveland neighborhoods and the people who love them.  In 2011, Weiss and his wife (CSU First-Year Writing Instructor) Amanda Lloyd, began publishing and editing their flagship neighborhood newspaper, The Tremonster, by and for their own neighborhood of Tremont.  Weiss developed an interest in community media as an advertising salesperson and writer for Cleveland-area newspapers The Call & Post, The Plain Press, and The Collinwood Observer.  Weiss is a member of the Holmden-Bhurer-Rowley block club and has previously served as a trustee on the boards of the Ingenuity Festival and Tremont West Development Corporation.

R. T. Andrews is Editor & Publisher of The Real Deal Press and President of the Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland. The Real Deal, born in 1991 as a scrappy and creative full-color monthly tabloid, has also appeared over the years as a digital weekly, a blog, and beginning later this month, as a full-fledged digital news site. Its focus is covering the intersection of race, class and power in the civic, commercial and cultural spaces of NE Ohio. No matter its format, it has consistently been “the place where you can read what you can’t read elsewhere”.

The new landscape for local news

A formative meeting of the Neighborhood and Community Media Association
at the Cleveland Public Library, January 2018 [NCMA-Cle/Leo Jeffres]

By R.T. Andrews

If you are going to be scooped on your own story, it’s likely best when a friend does it.

There is so much happening of grisly consequence these days — from the health, economic and civic ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic and the absolutely horrendous response thereto by so many of our leaders on every level; to what has quickly shaped up to the largest public corruption scheme in Ohio history; to the quiet federal invasion of our city; to the ongoing crises in city administration; to the sense of possibility that exists in this moment of racial recalibration — we might be forgiven for failing to report on a couple of matters right in our back yard.

The first of these neighborhood items is captured in this piece by Jay Miller, longtime Crain’s reporter, and one of a dwindling core of Cleveland journalists possessed of institutional memory. The local daily newspaper, the Plain Dealer, died unceremoniously a few months ago, intentionally deprived by its absentee owner over several years of the resources it needed to sustain and reinvent itself. For the moment, its shell is being inhabited by cleveland.com, a digital news site that currently uses the PD nameplate to imply a false continuity with a bygone era. [It’s reminiscent of when the Modell Browns slunk off to Baltimore; the NFL team’s records and colors stayed behind, but the replacement squad that arrived a few years later still bears no resemblance to the original.]

The media landscape has been changing rapidly all over the globe for the past quarter century, a development that shows no sign of abating. But even as so-called legacy newspapers gasp, shrivel, and vanish, the human and community need for local news and information about our increasingly complex, digitized, discontinuous, and amazing world, is, if anything, only heightened.  Of the seemingly dwindling number of truths that remain undiminished, one is this: nature abhors a vacuum.

And so, as Miller reports, a “local news ecosystem” is taking root in Northeast Ohio. One of the earliest manifestations was the reconstitution of an association of disparate community publications — some old, some new, some ethnic, some territorial, etc. The reborn organization, to which Miller devotes some appreciative space, is the Neighborhood and Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland. Indefatigable media person Rich Weiss, who, in addition to editing  a monthly print publication devoted to Cleveland’s Tremont area, also founded and directs the Neighborhood Media Foundation, has been the driving force behind the newly energized NCMA-CLE.

Association member publications include the Cleveland Street Chronicle, Collinwood Observer, East Side Daily News, Erie Chinese Journal, Euclid Observer, Heights Observer, La Mega Nota, Plain Press, Profile News Ohio, The Neighborhood News, The Real Deal Press, The Tremonster, Ward Seven Observer, and West Park Times.

New officers elected at the group’s June 25 meeting include The Real Deal Press publisher R. T. Andrews, president; Rich Weiss [publisher of The Tremonster], vice president; Jessie Schoonover [West Park Times editor-in-chief], treasurer; Ellen Psenica [Neighborhood News], secretary; and Ulysses Glen [East Side Daily News], parliamentarian.

Local news engages citizens, improves public decision-making and makes political and civic leaders accountable to their communities. ” — a study commissioned by area foundations last year

Miller’s article notes that “news deserts” —  communities where  information about local government and other matters is hard to come by — is not just an area phenomenon. In fact, as profiteers have swooped in and gobbled up legacy publishers’ assets, only to shrink the products and decimate the newsrooms, many foundations and other philanthropies have become alarmed, in part because of research that shows local governments tend to become less scrupulous as watchdog journalism decreases.

A study commissioned by the Cleveland and Knight foundations last year  [I was among those interviewed] concluded in part, Miller writes, that “local news engages citizens, improves public decision-making and makes political and civic leaders accountable to their communities. It also makes contributions to public health and political participation.”

In December, those foundations, along with the George Gund Foundation, the Akron Community Foundation, and the Center for Community Solutions, announced more than $110,000 in journalism grants to address community information needs in Akron and Cleveland.

While The Real Deal Press has not sought such funding, we are excited about several major recent steps to increase our capacity to keep readers informed, including collaborating with several journalistic partners, among them Eye on Ohio, the Ohio Capital Journal, and Your Voice Ohio Media Collaborative. And significantly, the long-promised and long-delayed rollout of our 2.0 website will occur by this Labor Day, just about a month before early voting begins.

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