I get most of my local news from Twitter. There, I follow a group of Clevelanders who are immensely invested in this city. They are mostly young; I often make fun of their millennial ways (how can you be in your twenties and so excited about busses and public transportation, I tease; shouldn’t you be out getting drunk and laid?). Some are journalists; most are intensely engaged citizens. From them, I learned the following, on January 2: city Councilman Ken Johnson never goes to this office, and is being paid a lot of unknown expenses by the city; a doctor at the Cleveland Clinic threatened to give Jewish patients the wrong medicine; the latest person to die in the Cuyahoga County jail wasn’t even supposed to be in jail; the lack of response to the shocking revelations made in the third season of Serial continues to inspire rage, powerlessness, and angst; there is no end of fun that can be made about Blockland; the weather here is concerningly warm.
This twitter cohort has no formal roster, though there is a hashtag, #CLETwitter, that is sometimes used, often in jest, and once a month or so, Ginger Christ, a reporter for the Plain Dealer, does the hard work of setting a time and place for this mushily-defined group to get together for beers. The day jobs of #CLETwitter include librarians, lawyers, non-profit employees, journalists, urban planners, students, academics, federal employees. I would hazard there are maybe 30, maybe 40?, people who would recognize themselves in the hashtag. In 2018, at least six of them moved away from Cleveland for better jobs, or in absence of any feasible employment opportunities here. Now, when we DM about beers, the departed often offer to buy a round for the group, toasting us in their absence.
When we talk about brain drain, about depopulation, about the serious problems this city has and does not seem to be addresses, I think about those six, and those beer-mugs-clicking emojis they use when they cannot meet for drinks.
Then, sometimes, I go and stare at some numbers (which today, I am told by a big bright red banner, are unreliable because the federal government has been shut down):
17% of residents of Cleveland have college degrees.
The average income is $19,401 per capita.
33.1% percent of Clevelanders live below the poverty line.
The median value of a house is 70,200.
Over the past ten year, the population of the city declined 2.8%.
When I think about what is happening in this city overall—the news, the endless proposals to improve the city’s economy, the sense of this place at any given moment, I think of the blue and white horizontal boxes of Twitter. When I am upset with something that has occurred, or want to ‘amplify’ something that cheers me, I fill up my own box with letters. Because there are inside jokes that I understand, that are told on a website privately owned by a man in California, I feel connected to the city. It is only because of this free website that I feel a sense of connection.
This chronicle is inspired by the stream that is Twitter, and what it enables; it is also an attempt to narrate that stream in another form. My ambitions for this project are to intermix local news as it happens, my own idiosyncratic personal experience (warning: some days might be TMI), and history of the city. Each month I will focus, but stray from, one theme: January is about journalism and news, broadly defined. So this promises to be my newsiest-about-the-news month. I will publish on no set schedule, but send at least four per month; I will publish these both for free and by optional paid subscription for awhile yet.
Yesterday, I received an anonymous email from a whistle blower tipping me off about malfeasance at a major institution in town. The writer sent it to me after having read my first chronicle, and noted the dearth of local news was a major reason this story had not been made public. To receive such an email was, well, a bit shocking. I am not a journalist by training (my training was in academia); I made sure the information got into the hands of a trained journalist. Meanwhile, I will be checking Twitter, hoping to see an article about this unsettling situation published soon. My DMs are open.