Great journalism. Watchdog reporting. New newsletters. Plenty of audience engagement. And a healthy bottom line.

Halfway through 2024 is a good time to provide you, the readers, with a status report. We started 2024 with a zeal to make it count, to demonstrate anew the importance of independent, hard-hitting journalism in the digital age. Many of you support us with subscriptions, and we want to remind you every day of how that support helps the community.

On the journalism front, we’re having a great year. Foremost is the project we called Delinquent, Our System, Our Kids. I’m unaware of any newsroom tackling a project like this, a rigorous examination of the entire Cuyahoga County juvenile justice system, told through the stories of dozens of children touched by the system.

Our top goal with the six-week series was to get readers to see juvenile offenders as children, not gun-toting hoodlums portrayed in some broadcast news reports. No one starts life as a criminal, and we can do a better job as a community of helping children when they stray – before they become violent criminals. The series offered insights into how we can do better. Reporters John Tucker and Kaitlin Durbin, working with editor Leila Atassi, did phenomenal work here.

Our series called Rethinking Childcare continues in 2024, with tangible results. When we began this project, coordinated by Content Director Laura Johnston, almost no one in Ohio talked about improving subsidies for childcare. Today, they’re talking about it everywhere, in chambers of commerce, legislative halls and executive offices. We have multiple laws proposed to get it done. Our reporting proved beyond all doubt that better childcare makes sense for all – moms and dads, employers, governments and, most important, the children.

On the watchdog front, we had Courtney Astolfi’s reporting on Phillip McHugh, who was hired as the number three person in Cleveland’s Public Safety Department. McHugh, the college roommate of Mayor Justin Bibb, had been a Washington D.C. police officer involved in a terrible civil rights case. He hounded an elderly Black couple based on flimsy of evidence that the woman had brandished a gun. His employer paid a six-figure settlement to the couple as a result. After news of the case emerged in Cleveland, McHugh visited with our Editorial Board to tell his version, saying that he developed the D.C. case against his will, at the direction of prosecutors. Courtney’s reporting turned up McHugh’s sworn deposition, which told a completely different story, meaning McHugh lied. He resigned four days after Courtney’s story published.

Hannah Drown’s reporting on the $20 million gift to the Cleveland Schools by MacKenzie Scott from her Amazon fortune, had big results. The schools had quietly pulled the money out of special programs partly determined by students, using it instead to prop up the district’s ailing budget. That reneged on a promise made when the money arrived, and Hannah’s reporting so embarrassed the district that it restored the program.

Hannah had another winner earlier this year. Working with Leila as her editor, she chronicled the path of the Brecksville Bees gymnastics team to its improbable 21st consecutive state championship, introducing readers to the Bees fantastic coaches and its stress-reduction techniques.

One of our roles is to be provocative, and one way we accomplished that is with our thought exercise published this month about creating a regional facilities commission to build a new airport and stadiums for professional sports teams deep into the future, relying on a tiny tax across multiple counties to pay for it all. Travelers are weary of our rundown airport, and airlines don’t like our high fees. Our proposal would build a new airport and get rid of the fees. Cleveland sports fans are weary of the ever-present threat a team will leave town for a new stadium, and our proposal would permanently end that possibility. We published it to start a conversation, and that conversation is robust.

Not everyone likes getting our content on our cleveland.com website or in the print or digital version of The Plain Dealer, so we kept expanding our free newsletters in 2024. We added MediCLE, a weekly roundup of the groundbreaking healthcare research across Ohio and in Cleveland. Studies by Ohio healthcare institutions keep advancing medicine, and reporters Julie Washington and Gretchen Cuda Kroen track it all through the newsletter.

With the acknowledgement that we’re not offering enough content to people in their 40s, Laura this year launched her Our Best Life column, examining all aspects of being a 40-something in the 2020s. The response has been terrific so far, and we think that audience engagement will make this column an informative conversation with readers.

We want to reward people who support us with subscriptions, and sports columnist Terry Pluto generously helped us do that. We converted a newsletter containing Terry’s content to something only subscribers can receive, and Terry, to make it worth their while, began writing content exclusively for his newsletter. For people who never want to miss what Terry writes, and there are a lot of them, subscribing is the only way to see the newsletter.

For entertainment, our big addition in 2024 is the DineDrinkCLE podcast, with Josh Duke, Alex Darus, Paris Wolfe, Marc Bona and Pete Chakerian having lively conversations about restaurant trends, bars, special menus and holiday fare. They clearly love what they do. It’s quite fun.

We’ve said for years now that among our most vital roles is having a conversation with readers, and we are doing that daily. More than 2,500 people now receive my weekday text messages about stories in the works, questions we seek to answer and more, and hundreds respond each week, making it a genuine conversation. The weekly From the Editor column brings a similar response, ensuring that we are accountable to readers and include their perspectives in what we do.

On the financial side, we continue to be solid. The newsroom is generating the revenue needed to pay for itself, which means we are sustainable. We rely on your support, so please keep it coming, but sustainability means security for our journalism jobs. I have not been this optimistic about the financial future of our newsroom in 20 years.

In the second half of the year, look for our collaboration with WKYC on an eye-opening project about youth sports. We’re also bringing National Weather Service alerts to our website for all of Ohio, in real time. And, we’re experimenting with artificial intelligence, for help covering areas for which we don’t have resources. Rest assured that nothing from AI will be published without a human touch, and we will make clear whenever we use it to help write a story.

We’re in a good place. Thanks for supporting us. Thanks for challenging us. Thanks for keeping the conversation going.

I'm at cquinn@cleveland.com

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