Pictured are outgoing Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor and General Manager George Rodrique (wearing light blue shirt) and Civil Rights leader the Rev. Jessee Jackson Sr.
By Kathy Wray Coleman, associate publisher, editor-in-chief
CLEVELANDURBANNEWS.COM, CLEVELAND, Ohio- Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor and General Manager George Rodrique is leaving Ohio's largest newspaper, effective March 1, he said in a farewell letter published Feb. 14 at Cleveland.com, the Plain Dealer's online affiliate.
"I’m going to miss my colleagues here in the Plain Dealer newsroom," said Rodrique via his farewell letter." They’ve inspired me, every single day."
Rodrique said that "working with people this dedicated to community service — to finding and telling the truth — builds powerful feelings not just of loyalty, but of love. I hope you can feel that, too, when you see their work in our pages."
Tim Warsinskey, currently the managing editor, will replace him as editor in chief beginning March 1.
Rodrigue said that he has accepted a position with the Plain Dealer's sister company, Advance Local.
He did not give specifics on what he will do in his new job other than to collaborate with editors of Advance venues in various cities.
Whether the shakeup in leadership will enhance relations with the Black community remains to be seen.
Speaking at a conference of the National Association of Black Journalists in August of 2018 Civil Rights icon the Rev Jesse Jackson Sr., also a former presidential candidate, called the newsrooms of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Columbus Dispatch, Ohio's second largest newspaper, "lily White and re-segregated."
Black greater Cleveland leaders in large part have also criticized newspaper officials as failing to embrace diversity in hiring and of perpetuating a dearth of Blacks at the newspaper and Cleveland.com across the continuum.
This includes, they say, a decline in Black reporters and photojournalists, to few if any Blacks as production managers, editors, designers, and top level staff.
They say the news coming from the Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com is traditionally bias against Blacks, even though Cleveland is a largely Black major American city
Founded in 1872, the Plain Dealer, once among one of 25 top newspapers in the country and owned by Advance Publications, has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Ohio, and had roughly 250,000 daily readers and 790,000 readers on Sundays before it switched to a four-day delivery newspaper in 2015, including Sundays.
Two years earlier, in 2013, the newspaper reported daily readership of 543,110 and a Sunday's readership of 858,376, a drop of nearly 50 percent of daily readers from 2013 to 2015 when it began under the leadership of Rodrigue with a reduced delivery week, and more than 50 fewer employees.
It had a daily circulation of 246,571 copies in 2016, and circulation figures continue to decline while competition from social media and the Internet in general continues to flourish.
The latest circulation numbers from the Alliance for Audited Media reported average Sunday circulation for the first quarter of 171,404 and average circulation for Wednesdays and Fridays, the only weekdays the paper is home delivered, of 94,838.
Last April the newspaper laid off a third of its unionized staff, including 12 newsroom employees such reporters, editors and photographers, followed by an additional 27 of 29 unionize employees last May.
The controversial layoffs last year upset the Guild, a union that represents select Plain Dealer employees, including reporters, copy editors, designers, photographers, and illustrators.
Union leaders have accused the newspaper and its hierarchical decision makers of trading local news for a centralized unit removed from the community, and of ignoring the union's proposal for more subscribers to reduce the number of layoffs, and strategies for keeping the news centrally located.
Rodrigue has said that in spite of the layoffs "the Plain Dealer will remain a local institution."
He blames the layoffs on declining revenue, growing social media and digital news competition, increased operating costs, and a reduced readership, among other assertions.
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, Ohio's most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog, which are also top in the Midwest in Black digital news.Tel: (216) 659-0473 and Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief, and who trained for 17 years at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview, CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.
