The News From Cleveland on January 1, 2019

Cleveland Chronicles Local Number 1

A chronicle, according to M. H. Abrams’ glossary of literary terms, is “a history or a record of events. It refers to any systematic account or narration of events that makes minimal attempt to interpret, question, or analyze that history.” Chronicles usually contain both global events as well as local ones, “the purpose being a recording of events that occurred, seen from the perspective of the chronicler. This is in contrast to narrative history, which sets selective events in a meaningful context.” They were most popular in the Medieval era, though the Bible contains a book of them, and there are some well-known Renaissance chronicles as well.  There are two types: live and dead chronicles. A live one records events as they happen, sometimes called annals;  a dead chronicle tells of what has happened. 

Newspapers could be seen as a modern version of a chronicle, hence many of their names, the Chronicle-Telegraphs, the Chronicle-Times, the Daily Chronicles.

Cleveland, Ohio does not have a chronicle, at least by name.  It has one daily newspaper, The Plain Dealer. Well, maybe it has two, as the same company that owns The Plain Dealer also runs a website called cleveland.com, which is also a daily newspaper, with the same bosses and owners as The Plain Dealer but different staffs, different editors, different publishers. Yes, everyone finds this confusing.  Advance Ohio is a subsidiary (I think?) of Advance Local, which is a subsidiary (I think?) of Advance National, which is a subsidiary of Advance Publications, which is owned by the Newhouse family, and also includes Conde Nast. Advance Whatever owns both The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com. 

But, basically:

On January 1, 2019, there is one daily newspaper in this city;

On January 1, 1919, there were six.

The workplace politics of the two separate-but-not Cleveland newspapers are as confusing as their ownership; one, The Plain Dealer, is unionized; cleveland.com is not. In late 2018, Advance Publications (or some damned Advance) busted the union and eliminated 29 jobs from The Plain Dealer, outsourcing them to…. Advance Local. The union tried to pushed back and negotiate but lost. The Plain Dealer News Guild was the nation’s first newspaper union. It was founded in 1933 as the Cleveland Newspaper Guild. Shortly thereafter, the American Newspaper Guild was founded, and the Cleveland News Guild became Local 1. At its height, it has over 700 members; in 1995 it had 525; today, it has, according to one news story I read, 68 members. I am not sure if that includes the recently-lost 29 or not.

All this happened within the space of a few weeks in December, while John Kelly and Mad Dog Mattis were announcing departures from the White House, troops were being withdrawn from Syria, Michael Cohen was doing mea culpas on news shows, Nancy Pelosi was arguing with the president, the federal government of the United States closed up shop, banners for Christmas specials were blasted over internet news sites, Pete Davidson became mentally unhinged, the Yellow Vests were rioting in Paris, and Netflix was streaming both Love, Actually and Die Hard.

If you want to read the news about the layoffs at the Plain Dealer  you have an astoundingly limited number of options: you can read the paper report on itself,  the local tv news, the alt weekly, ideastream, the local NPR affiliate, and…well, that’s about it, or at least all I could find on google on January 1, 2019.

What I did find on the morning of January 1, 2019 was the ‘front page’ of the local newspaper. This is what I found (I don’t know the difference between “Top Stories” and “News” so I am including both:

Under Top Stories tab: 

• Eighth Cuyahoga County jail inmate dies

• All 32 movies I saw in a theater in 2018, ranked

• Damarious Randall on the Browns in ‘19: ‘The AFC North knows it’s in trouble’

• 12 Beers to Try As the Year Comes To An End

• Ex-head of Cleveland’s Community Development Department arraigned on charges of trying to meet teen for sex

• Browns head coach search begins for John Dorsey. 

Under News tab:

• How we made a difference in Greater Cleveland in 2018: by Chris Quinn, publisher [opinion]

• Mega Millions jackpot $415 million; Ohio Lottery results

• Longer walks, higher costs: New Cleveland Hopkins drop-off locations, fees irk drivers, passengers, lot owners; 

• Ohio State-Washington Rose Bowl pick; 

• Suspected drunk driver kills couple in Akron; search for missing Cleveland man:

Notice what is there, but, mainly, notice what is absent. Notice what you do not even know to miss, gone without saying. What is not being chronicled here fills volumes.

Well, maybe one volume.

Tenses are hard: that list headlines is already gone, superannuated, overwritten as I write. For a few minutes there, it was live; now it is dead. The point remains: what is happening here? How can it be that in a moment characterized by too much news, there is perilously little, that a medieval form for recording events, a pre-print analogue to what in the Enlightenment became journalism, could even seem remotely like a good and useful idea?

Despite the Zeno’s paradox of temporality here—tenses will always be hard—consider this the first entry in a live chronicle of Cleveland in 2019, a recording of events of one year, in one city, filtered through a chronicler. By the time you read this it will be dead.