The Plain Dealer


The Plain Dealer is the primary newspaper of Cleveland, Ohio. In the fall of 2019, it ranked 23rd in U.S. newspaper circulation, a significant drop since March 2013, when its circulation ranked 17th daily and 15th on Sunday.
, The Plain Dealer had 94,838 daily readers and 171,404 readers on Sunday. The Plain Dealers media market, the Cleveland-Akron Designated Market Area, has a population of 3.8 million people making it the 19th-largest market in the United States.
As of 2023, Sunday print circulation had declined to 37,000 copies.
In August 2013, The Plain Dealer reduced home delivery to four days a week, including Sunday. A daily version of The Plain Dealer was available electronically as well as in print at stores, newsracks and newsstands.

History

Founding

The newspaper was established in January 1842 when two brothers, Joseph William Gray and Admiral Nelson Gray, took over The Cleveland Advertiser and changed its name to The Plain Dealer. The Cleveland Advertiser had been published from 1831 to 1841. Some sources attribute the current spelling of the city name to The Cleveland Advertisers dropping the first "a" from the name of the city's founder, Moses Cleaveland, so the newspaper's name would fit on the masthead but others dispute that story.

Name

When the Gray brothers began publishing their newspaper in 1842, they wrote an explanation of their choice of name; after a discussion of several other possible names, they wrote, "but our democracy and modesty suggest the only name that befits the occasion, the PLAIN DEALER." The phrase means "someone who interacts or does business straightforwardly and honestly". Their choice of name was probably inspired by The Plaindealer, a weekly paper described as Jacksonian or radical, published in New York City by William Leggett from 1836 to either 1837 or 1839. Several other newspapers in California, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Wisconsin, Manitoba, and South Australia later adopted versions of the same name in the 19th and early 20th centuries. At least three continue: Indiana Plain Dealer, a 2024 combination of newspapers including the former Wabash Plain Dealer, which had served Wabash, Indiana since 1859; the Ouray County Plaindealer of Ouray County, Colorado under names that included "Plaindealer" during 1888–1939 and since 1969; and the Cresco Times Plain Dealer of Cresco, Iowa. Winston Churchill reportedly said about the Cleveland paper, "I think that by all odds, the Plain Dealer has the best newspaper name of any in the world." Although its first edition in 1842 was captioned simply "The Plain Dealer", the name on the newspaper's masthead included "Cleveland" for much of its history, and dropped the city name sometime between 1965 and 1970.

Ownership history

Joseph William Gray owned and edited the newspaper from 1842 until his death in 1862. A series of editors controlled the paper between then and 1885, when real estate investor Liberty Emery Holden purchased it. When Holden died in 1913, ownership of the Plain Dealer was placed in trust for his heirs.
WHK and WJAY were purchased by United Broadcasting Company in 1934 and 1936, respectively. United Broadcasting company was owned by the Forest City Publishing Company, which in turn owned The Plain Dealer.
Until 1967, the paper's publishing company, The Plain Dealer Publishing Company, was part of the Forest City Publishing Company, which also published the Cleveland News until its closing in 1960. One of Holden's heirs, Holden's great-grandson Thomas Vail, became the paper's editor and publisher in 1963. On March 1, 1967, the Holden trustees, including Vail, sold the Plain Dealer to Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr.'s newspaper chain for $54.2 million, then the highest price ever paid for a U.S. newspaper. Advance Publications Inc., a New York-based media company owned by Newhouse's heirs, continues to own the Plain Dealer.

Competition

The Plain Dealer has been the sole major newspaper for Cleveland and Northeast Ohio since its two main 20th-century competitors, the Cleveland News and The Cleveland Press, closed in 1960 and 1982 respectively. However, since 2015, a number of nonprofit news outlets have begun reporting including the Cleveland Observer, Cleveland Documenters, The Land, and Signal Cleveland.

Awards and honors

Cleveland.com, which was launched by Advance Publications in 1997, is the sister company of The Plain Dealer. Cleveland.com has only an online presence, while The Plain Dealer provides a print newspaper only, not a digital edition. Content from each is cross-posted on the other site. Cleveland.com is described by its owners as "the premier news and information website in the state of Ohio". Though it is under the same ownership as The Plain Dealer, cleveland.com was operated by a separate company and had separate staff and offices.

History

The corporate structure underpinning these changes was the launch, announced in April 2013 and effective that August, of a "new, digitally focused company," also under ownership of Advance Publications, initially called the Northeast Ohio Media Group and renamed in January 2016 as Advance Ohio. The original, older parent company, Plain Dealer Publishing Company, kept responsibility for The Plain Dealer, only, while NEOMG gained responsibility for operating cleveland.com and Sun Newspapers. NEOMG was also made responsible for all ad sales and marketing for The Plain Dealer, Sun News, and cleveland.com. Both NEOMG and the Plain Dealer Publishing Company provide content to The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com.
One way that contemporary observers viewed the 2013 establishment of NEOMG, in conjunction with the termination of daily home delivery and personnel cuts of the same year, was as implementation by The Plain Dealer's owner, Advance Publications, of a strategy to change its business from daily delivery of a print newspaper to online delivery of news, as Advance had done when it ended daily delivery of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Another way that the formation of NEOMG has been viewed is as a strategy to weaken, and ultimately kill, a labor union, by moving tasks from the unionized Plain Dealer staff to the non-unionized staff at cleveland.com. Dividing The Plain Dealer into two separate companies—a unionized, print organization and a non-union, online organization—was dubbed a "transparent union-busting schism scheme" by Cleveland Scene an alternative weekly Cleveland newspaper. The labor union representing Plain Dealer employees was called, from its founding in 1933 until its closure in 2020 as a result of these changes, Newspaper Guild Local 1, because it was the first local chapter of the national union now called the NewsGuild. The Plain Dealer News Guild also called NEOMG's formation evidence of Advance's involvement in "union-busting", and repeated the claim in response to subsequent layoffs.
In February 2017, Advance Ohio named Chris Quinn editor and publisher. Quinn previously served as vice president of content at NEOMG and was the metro editor at The Plain Dealer prior to that.
In 2019, cleveland.com was attracting an average of 9.9 million users monthly.

Reviews

In 2006, Cleveland Magazine called cleveland.com "mediocre compared to its peers", while saying that it "has only recently started to improve". In 2012, Cleveland Scene, the alternative weekly, said that "Advance's sites are notoriously poorly designed and borderline unnavigable" and, to demonstrate its non-local management, said that Advance wanted to give the cleveland.com site a black-and-yellow color scheme, "until someone informed them those are Steelers colors".

Shrinking in the 21st century

Since the late 20th century, like other media business organizations, the newspaper has faced reductions in circulation and revenue; it has undergone restructuring and layoffs.

Declining circulation

The paper's circulation declined from the 1980s through about the first decade of the twenty-first century, then dropped precipitously in the following decade or so; the following figures show that in the 24 years between 1983 and 2007 the paper's circulation dropped by 33% and 11%, while in the next 12 years between 2007 and 2019, it lost a further 79% and 62% of its daily and Sunday circulation.
DateWeekday circ.Sunday circ.
May 13, 1983497,386501,042
2007334,194445,795
March 31, 2009291,630393,352
March 31, 2010not avail.362,394
Sep. 30, 2010252,608348,324
Sep. 30, 2011243,299344,089
March 31, 2013216,122301,806
May 2018141,053216,711
May 201994,838171,404