The police blotter newsletter we announced in January is a hit, with more than 10,000 people already signed up to receive it free each weekday.

We’re talking proactive signups -- people who subscribed at https://www.cleveland.com/newsletters 

This is a win-win, as we see it. Our readers like getting products for free. And we get the extra advertising revenue that comes from both the newsletter and the specific blotters, if readers choose to click on the links.

For the uninitiated, the police blotters are brief rundowns of calls that many suburban police departments respond to, without names or specific street addresses. We’ve gathered them for years for the weekly Sun newspapers we publish. Eventually, we might add some blotters from municipalities not covered by the Suns, such as Euclid and Mentor.

We like newsletters because people who read them are more likely to become subscribers to cleveland.com. Those subscriptions pay for our journalism that so many rely upon to keep them abreast of what’s happening in Northeast Ohio and the state.

The blotter newsletter is the first of several we’re launching this year. The second, launched a week ago, is quite different. The weekly Dine Drink CLE, arriving by email on Thursdays, includes the latest news on greater Cleveland’s foodie scene -- restaurant openings and closings, news about bars and more. It’s a companion of sorts to the popular In The CLE newsletter, which publishes on Fridays and lays out the best bets for your leisure hours each weekend.

Both Dine Drink CLE and In the CLE were created by Mike Norman, our entertainment manager. Every time I open the weekend newsletter, I’m impressed anew at what Mike and his team put together, week after week. I expect I’ll feel the same way about Dine Drink CLE.

We’re considering two other newsletters this year.

One would be a Terry Pluto newsletter, containing links to everything, or nearly everything, he writes. And he writes a lot. His sports columns. His scribbles about your favorite teams. His features. And his ever-more-popular Saturday column about faith. We believe we could fill two newsletter editions a week.

If we go this route, I suspect we’ll get to 10,000 subscribers faster than we did with the blotters. Terry is the most beloved writer in Northeast Ohio. People write all the time to praise him or thank him for his pieces. 

We’re also considering a weekly travel newsletter, to feature the work of one of the best travel writers and editors in the nation, Susan Glaser. You might remember a column I wrote about her in 2021 when she actually was named the very best in the nation. You can read it at: https://tinyurl.com/susanglaserwins

Susan’s travel writing is special because it is about the places Ohioans go, and her writing makes you feel like you’ve accompanied her - or want to.  Throughout the year, she takes us to interesting places and offers inviting itineraries. 

Her work appears on cleveland.com and in The Plain Dealer, and we’re thinking about featuring both her newer pieces and some for the past few years in a newsletter. We’d have to update the older pieces, to make sure they remain relevant. The newsletter would offer another avenue for people to keep up with Susan’s work and be reminded of destinations they might want to visit.

Please check out Dine Drink CLE and let me know your thoughts. And if you’d be interested in a Terry Pluto or travel newsletter, please let me know that, too. You can sign up for free for all of our newsletters at https://www.cleveland.com/newsletters.

One caveat to all of this: Although the newsletters are free and most of the content they link to is available to read by anyone, some of the content in the newsletters is for paying subscribers only.

On a separate topic, a lot of people responded to the piece I wrote two weeks ago about an illustration of St. Patrick. We put together a collection of the responses, which you can read at: https://tinyurl.com/StPatrickillustrated 

I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com. 

Thanks for reading.