After publishing a monstrously long column last week about the Veiled Lady of Kirtland, I offer a series of short updates today.
Top among them is a follow up on the piece I wrote about endorsements and how we conduct our process. Several people responded by asking how many Republicans and Democrats we endorsed, and now that the process has ended, I have the answer.
For the general election endorsements, we gave the nod to 20 Democrats and 14 Republicans. This includes races for statewide offices, Congress, judgeships and more.
In what many consider the big races, we endorsed Democrats for the U.S. Senate, secretary of state and three Ohio Supreme Court seats. We endorsed Republicans for governor, attorney general, auditor and treasurer. In the case of the Supreme Court, the Editorial Board found that the three Republican incumbents abandoned their duty to the law and the Ohio Constitution to put their party ahead of the people.
Some readers asked why our endorsements ran so late into the season, ending well after early voting started. The last ones appeared Wednesday, less than a week before Election Day.
We have two answers. One is that early voting has cramped us. The period between the candidate filing deadline and early voting leaves us too little time to get our work done before early voting begins. The other, though, is specific to this year: The candidates held us off. They claimed conflicts, but we suspect they delayed in case they did not like what we ended up saying about them. By delaying the process, they left less time for anything negative to resonate with voters. Whatever the reason, we acquiesced because we felt it important to talk to them before endorsing.
You can find the entire slate of endorsements here.
Topic number two: Months ago, we solicited reader thoughts on topics for a survey of Northeast Ohio residents, aiming mostly for local issues. We then worked with the pollsters at Baldwin Wallace University to conduct the survey.
I’m happy to report that the responses are filled with fascinating insights, and we have begun publishing what looks to be two months of stories. Because several questions were election-related, we worked on those first. We asked what people think of Ohio’s elections security, whether they favor an idea from the Cuyahoga County Executive’s race about a unified countywide municipal income tax and their opinion of controversial Congressman Jim Jordan.
In the weeks ahead, we’ll report public opinion on closing Burke Lakefront Airport, spending tens of millions of dollars on the failed Medical Mart, what to do about the city football stadium and more.
We did this survey exclusively for our paying subscribers, so the stories are not available to everyone. It takes a lot of money to do the work we do, and we appreciate the support we receive from subscribers. This is one way for us to say thanks. You can subscribe here.
Third on the update list: I’ve written several times about readers wanting more stories that depart from the harsh news of the day. Discord is high across the land, and readers say that visiting our platforms should not be all doom and gloom. They want some relief.
We’ve responded by publishing a weekly gardening column by Susan Brownstein, which is a hit with readers. We’re also running a monthly column about life on the road in a recreational vehicle, and regular columns by our content director, Laura Johnston, about a renovation project in her house. Reporter Bob Higgs is telling the tales of old houses in the region, too.
To those, we now add a biweekly column by Jane Morice, a social media specialist in our newsroom. Jane is getting married next year, and her column is a real-time examination of everything that goes into planning weddings. Jane has a conversational writing style, making for an accessible column about a topic most people have an interest in at some point in their lives. She’ll provide insights into the modern state of weddings.
Finally, I mentioned the long piece I wrote last week about a century of mis-reporting on Harriet “Hattie” Martindale, known as The Veiled Lady of Kirtland, offering a lens on how journalism standards have changed over the decades. The Plain Dealer published variations of the flawed story in 1909, 1940, 1970 and 2000.
In the piece, I mentioned that The Plain Dealer of the 1990s was a poor specimen of a newspaper, and I wish I had said it was a poor specimen of a newspaper with a lot of excellent reporters and editors. My point was about the leadership of the era and the lack of uniform ethical and journalism standards. Despite the mediocrity, the paper back then had a lot of very good journalists doing terrific work, and I was proud to work with many of them in the ensuing decades. I apologize for unintentionally demeaning them by failing to note their presence.
Thanks for reading.
