By Kathy Wray Coleman, Publisher, Editor-n-Chief, Cleveland Urban News. Com and The Cleveland Urban News.Com Blog, Ohio's Most Read Online Black Newspaper

CLEVELAND, Ohio-The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ohio's largest newspaper, will layoff a third of its 168 newsroom staff next year Guild President Harlan Spector told union members in an email today.

Spector said that management had notified him that some 58 union positions of the Northeast Ohio Guild Local One are subject to either layoff or an offer at Cleveland.com, the newspaper's online news venue which brings in a fraction of the revenue the print newspaper gets.

The Guild includes reporters, columnists, photographers, designers and some editors.

On Sunday Spector and former Guild president and retired Plain Dealer Reporter Richard Peery met with a group of Cleveland area majority Black community activist leaders and some Black elected officials at Lil Africa on Cleveland's largely Black east side of town and those in attendance voted 2-to-1 to  back the union on the issue before them, and called for Advance Publishing, the newspaper's owner,  to keep the Plain Dealer a daily print publication instead of going to three-days-a-week as contemplated.

But the activists said that their support is contingent upon the promise that Guild members will push for fair play for the Black community, something Spector promised community activists.

"Yes," said Spector to the question posed by community activists at the forum on whether he would push the union to demand fair coverage in the Black community if supported.

Those in attendance include Ohio State Rep. Bill Patmon, who moderated the discussion, Cleveland Ward Councilwoman Mamie Mitchell, Cleveland NAACP Affiliate Darnell Brewer, Former East Cleveland City Councilman Charles E. Bibb Sr, Community Activists Art McKoy, Frances Caldwell, Amy Hurd,  Ada Averyhart, Entrepenuer Michael Nelson, Al Porter, Roz McAllister, Ernie Smith, Donna Walker Brown, Kimberly F. Brown, Mariah Crenshaw, Willie Stokes, Shidea Lane, Jean Whitte, Dionne Thomas Carmichael and  Betty Mahone.

Activists debated the pros and cons of supporting the union's request for support after drilling Spector and Peery and in the end said that reading beat out any anger in over disproportionate reporting and the attack on some Black elected officials over the decades of the newspaper's 170-year run.

They voted 20 to 9 in favor of Spector's request.

"'I would not want to live in a community as large as Cleveland without at least one major daily newspaper," said Community Activist Genevieve Mitchell, a former Cleveland School Board member and current member of The Carl Stokes Brigade.

Some said no though. They include Community Activists Donna Walker Brown, Ada Averyhart, Kimberly F. Brown, Entrepreneur Michael Nelson, Gerald Henley and Frances Caldwell, one of the organizer's of the forum and the executive director of the Cleveland African American Museum.

"The Plain Dealer is like the Pookie in the Black community whose funeral you attend and say good things about even when you know he has done wrong,"  said Nelson.

"It won't affect us because the Plain Dealer has disrespected the Black community, "Caldwell told reporters after the meeting Sunday.

A Plain Dealer reporter, Spector acknowledges disfavor by some Black community members but he and Perry said management is primarily to blame with Peery adding that it has gone on because the Cleveland NAACP  leadership team has not spoken up.

"Black leaders have to demand fair coverage," said Peery, who retired from the newspaper with 35 years of service.  "It use to be the NAACP that would demand it."

Kathy Wray Coleman, an organizer of the event who secured Spector's  agreement on behalf of the community activists there to urge his union colleagues to urge the newspaper's publisher to ease up on its unfair treatment of Blacks and who leads the Imperial Women and publishes Cleveland Urban News.Com said that community activists will monitor the transition process at the newspaper.

"We will picket management at the Plain Dealer if Blacks and women are is proportionately targeted and if the collective bargaining agreement, if applicable, is not adhered to," said Coleman at the forum on Sunday

Plain Dealer Publisher Terry Egger, who will retire this month, and Plain Dealer Editor Debra Adams Simmons, who is Black, were both invited but did not attend the Sunday gathering saying the invitation from the community activists was "short notice."

Spector told Guild members yesterday that he would seek an extension of the February union contract provision against any layoffs and pay concessions and that there is no firm date in which the expected layoffs with become effective.

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