Cleveland.com
Cleveland.com is the digital news brand for Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, published at cleveland.com by Advance Local. It was launched by Advance Publications in 1997 as the online sister of The Plain Dealer, Cleveland's historic daily newspaper, and for most of its life it operated as a separate company with its own staff and offices while sharing content with the paper. A corporate restructuring in 2013 placed the site at the centre of a new, digitally focused company — first called the Northeast Ohio Media Group and renamed Advance Ohio in January 2016 — and after the Plain Dealer's union newsroom was wound down in 2020, Cleveland.com became the surviving newsroom of the combined operation. Its owners describe it as the premier news and information website in the state of Ohio.
Overview
Cleveland.com publishes local news, Cleveland and Ohio sports, entertainment, lifestyle coverage, weather, obituaries and opinion for readers across Northeast Ohio. Its market is the Greater Cleveland metropolitan area and the wider region — Cuyahoga County and the surrounding counties — and its sports remit covers the Browns, Guardians and Cavaliers, Ohio State and the region's high schools. Content from the site and from The Plain Dealer is cross-posted between the two, so that the print newspaper and the website present substantially the same journalism under two brands with a complicated shared history.
That history is what makes Cleveland.com more than a newspaper website. For seven years it existed in parallel with a separate unionised newsroom producing the same city's newspaper, a split that shaped Cleveland journalism, drew national attention from the Columbia Journalism Review and Cleveland's alternative press, and ended with the digital operation absorbing the work of the print one. Profiling Cleveland.com means profiling that transition.
Launch in 1997
Advance Publications announced the launch of Cleveland.com in 1997, an early date for a metro newspaper web brand. From the beginning it was structured unusually: an online-only sister of The Plain Dealer, allowed to share content with the paper while retaining its own offices, staff and company structure. The Plain Dealer itself provided a print newspaper and not a digital edition of its own; the digital audience belonged to Cleveland.com.
For its first decade and a half, this arrangement was mostly a background fact for readers, who encountered one body of Cleveland journalism across two platforms. Behind the scenes, however, the separation mattered. The Plain Dealer's journalists were represented by the NewsGuild; Cleveland.com's were not. As print economics deteriorated — the Plain Dealer lost some 30 percent of its 372 newsroom staff to buyouts and firings between 2006 and 2009 alone — the existence of a parallel, non-union digital company gave the owner options that a single integrated newsroom would not have.
The 2013 Restructuring
The structure became the strategy in 2013. Announced in April and effective that August, Advance launched what it called a new, digitally focused company, the Northeast Ohio Media Group, under the same ownership. The Plain Dealer Publishing Company kept responsibility for the print newspaper only. The new company took over operation of Cleveland.com and of the Sun News suburban weekly papers, and became responsible for all advertising sales and marketing for the Plain Dealer, the Sun papers and the website. Both companies continued to provide content to both products.
The change arrived alongside cuts to the print institution: daily home delivery was reduced, and 58 of the Plain Dealer's remaining 168 union staff were laid off, with thirteen more transferring to the new digital company. Contemporary observers read the Cleveland restructuring, as they had read the earlier changes in New Orleans, as Advance converting its business from daily delivery of a printed newspaper to online delivery of news. In January 2016, several weeks after a further newsroom reorganisation that included layoffs, the Northeast Ohio Media Group was renamed Advance Ohio, the name under which the Cleveland.com operation is still organised within Advance Local.
Two Newsrooms, One City
What followed was, by many accounts, an uneasy coexistence. Cleveland Scene, the city's alternative weekly, described the Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com operations after 2013 as functioning in practice as rival newsrooms rather than willing collaborators, despite sharing an owner, a market and each other's pages, with hostility between the union and non-union staffs complicating cooperation and mentorship. The Columbia Journalism Review, chronicling the Plain Dealer newsroom's last days, noted that Advance positioned Cleveland.com as a separate media entity even though stories from both newsrooms had always appeared on the same site and in the same paper.
The end came in stages. Further buyouts, redundancies and reassignments through 2018 and 2019 reduced the Plain Dealer's union staff to four journalists by April 2020. In May 2020 those four were laid off and offered roles in the Cleveland.com newsroom, leaving the Plain Dealer with no union-protected newsroom employees of its own — the dissolution, after more than eighty years, of the Guild unit that had been Local One, holder of the inaugural charter of what is now the NewsGuild. Cleveland coverage thereafter fell largely to the Cleveland.com staff, the outcome the 2013 structure had made possible.
Leadership
The digital newsroom's defining editor is Chris Quinn, president of Advance Ohio and editor of Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. Quinn joined The Plain Dealer in 1996, after reporting jobs in New Jersey, Delaware, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Orlando, Florida, and moved into editing in 2002. From 2006 he led the newspaper's metro operation, overseeing its coverage of the Cuyahoga County corruption crisis, the Anthony Sowell serial killings, the Chardon school shooting, a year-long investigation of a county prosecutor's practices and an examination of the use of force by Cleveland police. Advance tapped him to lead the newsroom created by the 2013 split.
Quinn is also the public face of the brand. He hosts a daily news discussion podcast, Today in Ohio, and his Letter from the Editor column reaches more than 200,000 people by email each week — a direct-to-reader channel that is itself part of the site's digital strategy, and one through which he has explained, and defended, the newsroom's most controversial choices.
Coverage and Editorial Focus
Cleveland.com's journalism spans the full metro brief: Cleveland City Hall and Cuyahoga County government, courts and public safety, education, health — anchored by institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic — business and development, and an entertainment and dining scene serving the wider region. Its accountability reporting descends directly from the metro tradition Quinn came from: corruption, policing and prosecutorial power have been recurring subjects, and the examination of Cleveland police use of force his newsroom produced was undertaken while the department was under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department.
Sports is the other pillar. Cleveland's professional teams command intense local loyalty, and the site covers the Browns, Guardians and Cavaliers with beat reporting and commentary, alongside Ohio State athletics and high school sports across Northeast Ohio. Opinion, obituaries, weather and service journalism — the daily utilities of a metro site — complete a mix designed to make Cleveland.com the default homepage for the region in a way the print paper, on its reduced delivery schedule, no longer could be.
Digital Strategy and the AI Rewrite Desk
Cleveland.com's recent history includes one of American journalism's most debated experiments in artificial intelligence. In October, editor Chris Quinn posted a job listing for an AI rewrite specialist: a hire who would use an AI chatbot to turn journalists' reporting into written articles and then fact-check the result, on the theory that reporters freed from writing would have more time to report. The role was filled the following January by Joshua Newman, previously at LoneStarLive.com in Austin, who began producing stories with the help of an in-house version of ChatGPT provided by Advance Local. Stories produced this way carried the byline Advance Local Express Desk and a note that the article was produced with assistance from AI tools and reviewed by Cleveland.com staff.
Quinn defended the experiment in his letter to readers, arguing that removing writing from reporters' workloads effectively freed an extra workday a week for reporting, and that artificial intelligence is the future of newsrooms rather than a threat to them. The response from the wider industry was sharp, as the Columbia Journalism Review documented: a HuffPost editor suggested Quinn should resign, the American Press Institute criticised his case as anecdotal, and a former Financial Times editor called the approach, in the words of one summary, beyond dumb. Whatever its merits, the episode established Cleveland.com as a test bed for its owner's national digital strategy — the same role, in a different technology, that the site had played in 2013.
Ownership and Business Model
Cleveland.com is owned by Advance Publications, the Newhouse family company, and operated by Advance Ohio within the Advance Local group. Its business model combines digital subscriptions — sold in bundles with the Plain Dealer's eNewspaper and print home delivery on its remaining days — with advertising sold across the website, the newspaper and the Sun News suburban papers, for which Advance Ohio also handles sales and marketing. The 2013 settlement, in which the digital company controlled the advertising business of all three products, expressed the model's logic: the website is the commercial centre of gravity, and print is one product among several that it supports.
Current Status
Cleveland.com continues as Northeast Ohio's principal digital news source, publishing the combined journalism of its own newsroom and what remains of the Plain Dealer operation, under Chris Quinn's editorship, from Cleveland. Nearly three decades after its 1997 launch as a print paper's online sister, it has become the institution itself — the clearest example in Advance's portfolio of a digital brand outliving, and ultimately absorbing, the newspaper that created it.
