Feedback steadily rolls into our newsroom about our various platforms, good and bad.
Some people tell us they prefer the curated content in The Plain Dealer to the rapidly churning cleveland.com, which they find confusing. Some tell us our newsletters give them what they want. Some criticize us for offering too much content via podcasts. Others say the podcasts are the platform they favor. Everyone, it seems, has a preference.
Not all that long ago, when we had more than four times as many people working in the newsroom, our only platform was a newspaper -- one considerably bigger than it is today. These days, we try to meet people wherever they wish.
Based on the correspondence I receive, I doubt that many people are familiar with all the ways they can engage with us. My goal today is to change that.
Let’s start with cleveland.com, our “everything” platform. All day, every day, nearly everything we do goes on the website. The home page features the biggest stories in news, sports and entertainment, but if that’s too much, you can focus on your favorite topics by bookmarking the subject pages for news, individual sports teams or whatever tickles you. The churn is rapid on cleveland.com, so keeping up with the news requires frequent visits.
The Plain Dealer is our most carefully curated platform. We take care to offer readers a full local report of news, opinion, entertainment and sports stories, along with a robust arrayof interesting national and international stories. With the new Update section included in the online version of the newspaper – which is part of any subscription – The Plain Dealer also contains late-breaking news and sports scores.
You need a subscription to read The Plain Dealer or to access everything on cleveland.com, and you can get one at https://subscribe.cleveland.com/
The Wake Up newsletter is our best platform for getting updated on the news fast. It is the most compact and complete roster of news and entertainment stories that our newsroom has produced in the previous news cycle. More than twice as many people subscribe to The Wake Up as The Plain Dealer, and our metrics show they read it. The newsletter has one paragraph summaries of each story, topped by a short personal note about the news of the day by Content Director Laura Johnston. It gets emailed at 5:30, Monday through Friday. It’s free, although some links are to stories that are exclusively for subscribers to The Plain Dealer or cleveland.com.
If you want a focus on the Ohio Statehouse and politics, our Capitol Letter newsletter has it all. I mean that literally. The weekday newsletter contains a paragraph on each piece produced by members of our Statehouse and politics team, as well as descriptions and links to stories by the rest of the Ohio media, with national media thrown in when they pay attention to our state. This is one of the highest-quality products we have. It’s free, but some of the links take you to a paywall, ours or those of other media.
What if you want sports instead of news? We have newsletters for a general sports update as well as individual newsletters about the Browns, Guardians, Cavs and Buckeyes. We have another for high school sports, one for sports betting and one that is all about what Terry Pluto writes.
You want diversions from the news. Some of our most popular newsletters are about entertainment. The weekly DineDrinkCle is loaded with stories about the region’s restaurant and bar scene. InTheCLE is our weekly things-to-do newsletter, a curated list of the best ways to spend your leisure hours, whether individually, with friends or family. And Travels with Susan makes sure you never miss Susan Glaser’s latest travel recommendations, along with some of her suggestions from the past.
We also have an Akronheadlines newsletter called Rubber City Update, a breaking news newsletter, an obituaries newsletter and a few more.
You can subscribe to as many as you want, all free, at cleveland.com/newsletters.
What about if you want to listen to our news instead of reading it? Our weekday Today in Ohiopodcast is a half hour discussion of the top eight or nine local and state news stories of the cycle. Laura, Leila Atassi, Lisa Garvin and I have lively discussions, laying out unanswered questions and providing unique perspectives. Most people who listen stay with us for the full half hour, and some tell us the podcast is their sole local news source, giving them everything they want to know.
We have a similar audio approach to sports, five days a week.
Our Browns coverage team lead by Mary Kay Cabot offer hot takes on what is going on with the team, with rich analysis, on Orange and Brown Talk.
Our Ohio State Buckeyes team does the same with Buckeye Talk.
For the Guardians, the legendary Paul Hoynes and Joe Noga probe questions that no one else tackles on Cleveland Baseball Talk.
And, starting this week, we now have a five-day-a-week Cavs podcast, with new host Ethan Sands going into depth with Cavs beat writer Chris Fedor, who offers expert analysis. It’s called Wine and Gold Talk.
Finally, Terry Pluto has his own weekly podcast, Terry’s Talkin’, and the person he talks with is our sports editor Dave Campbell. Terry is beloved in Northeast Ohio, and his podcast offers a personal touch. Like all of our podcasts, you can find Terry’s on Apple Podcasts or any other platform where you download podcasts.
That’s a lot, but I’m not finished. We also engage via text messages.
I send free texts each weekday about what we are working on or talking about in our newsroom. Responding to my texts has evolved into the best way for readers to share what they are thinking, and they do, thousands of times a month. You can sign up at https://joinsubtext.com/chrisquinn
Our reporters who cover sports teams use the same text service to keep you posted on what they know and what they are thinking. Subscribing carries a small cost, but many fans love the insights. Multiple times a day, reporters send messages straight to your phone, keeping you in the know. You can try each for 14 days free.
For texts about the Guardians, https://joinsubtext.com/clevelandguardians
For messages about the Browns, https://joinsubtext.com/clefootball
For the Buckeyes, https://joinsubtext.com/buckeyetalk
And for the Cavs, https://joinsubtext.com/cavsinsider
Lastly, were all over social media. On Facebook. Instagram (@clevelanddotcom.) X (@clevelanddotcom). YouTube. Even Tik Tok these days (@clevelanddotcom).
Filling all of the platforms I list here is a heavy lift, and it is far cry from the days when all we did was publish a newspaper, but we want to provide our work to you in whatever form you want it. Maybe this list brings you to a platform of which you were unaware.
I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com.
Thanks for reading