The Importance of the Newspaper

You might not always love the Plain Dealer, and you might not always hate the Plain Dealer. Either way, we all need a major newspaper covering our beat. 

You won't get any news from City Hall, even though they have 27(!) departments including 3 dedicated to "Community Relations", "Consumer Affairs" and "TV20". 

City Council won't even publish the schedule and agenda for City Council meetings on their website. They have a box called "Events" that do not include any council events. 

They have 168 hours to fill every week on a dedicated cable TV channel paid for by us subscribers. Why not fill them with video of the council meetings? Stuff that really matters, that affect every neighborhood in the City, that affect how we live our day-to-day lives, extending down to the level of how we take out our trash. I'd like to see the history and thought process that culminated in the decision to allow our sanitation workers to write us $100 tickets. 

Which, BTW, is the same price as a traffic camera ticket. Somehow, I don't think putting a banana peel in the recycle bin falls into the same category as blowing through a red light at 50 MPH. It's astonishing how deeply flawed Cleveland's decision making process has become.

Has anyone in the city administration ever talked about the VADXX plastic-to-oil pressure vessel and its 11 tons per year of particulates they intend to put in Ward 8? The PD did, two months ago. Still no word from the Mayor's office or City Council. http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/04/vadxx_energy_plan_to_extablish.html

The good news is that we're still getting the molecule-based newspaper 4 days a week. The better news is that now I access the electron-based Cleveland.com on any of my 4 computers, my android and my iPad...wherever I have internet...anywhere in the world, even when I'm not home. Even better: now I can search for a topic and get a full history of news articles, reports, blogs, everything ever written in the PD about that topic. (at least in Firefox, Cleveland.com's search function doesn't yet support Chrome. I'll never know if it works on Internet Explorer).

So support your local newspaper: it has a much larger impact on our daily lives than any gun legislation. I keep comparing the NRA argument that adversarial governments will always try to take away our weapons: the SMART adversarial governments take away our newspapers long before they go after our weapons.

Support your local newspaper, whether it's the PD or the Beacon Journal. 

Full disclosure: I delivered the ABJ when I was a teenager, it paid for my first motorcycle; and I'm a card-carrying member of the NRA with a valid CCW..