FreshWater Cleveland: The Positive-News Magazine Chronicling a City's Reinvention
FreshWater Cleveland is an online magazine that has covered Cleveland, Ohio, since 2010 with an explicit editorial promise: to report all that's good in and around the city. While legacy outlets chronicle Cleveland's councils, courts and crises, FreshWater tells the stories of the people, businesses and organizations remaking its neighborhoods — the entrepreneurs opening shops in underserved districts, the artists building opportunities for young people, the community development corporations rethinking how redevelopment works. It is solutions-and-people journalism, published weekly, that treats the city's revival as a beat.
Founded under Detroit-based Issue Media Group and acquired at the end of 2022 by its own longtime editor and photographer, FreshWater is now locally owned and locally produced — a transition its owners announced as a recommitment to the mission it started with. In a city whose national image long lagged its reality, the publication has argued for sixteen years that the progress stories are news too, and that telling them is a form of civic infrastructure.
Overview
FreshWater describes itself as a daily e-magazine and website covering what's next — and all that's good — in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. Each week it publishes a fresh wave of stories about the region's most creative people, businesses, organizations and neighborhood developments. Its stated focus areas are technology, innovation, diversity, local food and entrepreneurship, and its intended reader is creative, mobile and curious: someone who wants to know where the growing companies are, where innovation is happening and where neighborhood transformation is taking root.
The magazine publishes Monday through Thursday and distributes a free weekly email edition, supported by sponsors, partners and, increasingly, direct reader contributions. Its photography is a signature — original images by its managing photographer accompany its features — and its archive reaches back to its first issues, when its writers were already framing Cleveland's story around momentum: a contemporary arts scene serving as an economic engine, community development corporations adopting holistic strategies, and wayfinding and public space as redevelopment tools.
History and Founding
FreshWater launched in 2010 as part of Issue Media Group (IMG), a publisher of regional online magazines built on the model IMG had pioneered in Detroit: narrative, development-focused journalism about cities in transition. Cleveland, then deep in a civic argument about its own future, was fertile ground. The founding mission, restated at the magazine's 100th issue in November 2012 — just over two years after launch — was to share stories about the people, businesses and organizations working daily to make Cleveland a more desirable place to live, work and play. The editors framed that work against a national urban renaissance and a competition for the creative class, arguing Cleveland was looking more attractive by the day and that they intended to be there every step of the way.
The model proved durable. IMG itself grew fast enough to make the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies, with 170 percent three-year sales growth and a portfolio FreshWater was part of alongside some seventeen other regional e-zines. Through the 2010s FreshWater settled into its weekly rhythm, chronicling the downtown and neighborhood revivals — Ohio City, Tremont, Gordon Square, University Circle and the east-side districts — as they unfolded, and surviving as contemporaries in Cleveland media came and went.
Ownership and Business Model
In December 2022, longtime staff members Karin Connelly Rice and Bob Perkoski acquired FreshWater from Issue Media Group, and in early 2023 they relaunched it under FreshWater Media, LLC with a new site design. Both had been part of the publication's evolution since its original 2010 launch — Rice as managing editor, Perkoski as its photographer — and they said the chance to own it locally was one they seized because the publication fills a needed news void in Cleveland. The relaunched FreshWater kept the founding mission verbatim in spirit: reporting on all that's good in Cleveland, focusing on the positive change people and organizations are making to uplift and celebrate the city.
The business model is the classic independent-magazine mix — advertising, sponsorships and partnerships — now supplemented by reader support. FreshWater periodically appeals directly to readers, including on the first national Local News Day in April 2026, when Rice asked the community to invest in Cleveland's stories through one-time, monthly or yearly contributions, describing the outlet as a locally owned, independent, sixteen-year-old, award-winning news source. The ask reflects the economics of niche local publishing: a loyal, place-attached audience is the asset, and reader revenue increasingly underwrites what sponsorship alone cannot.
Coverage and Content
FreshWater's coverage is organized around neighborhood change. Its reporters introduce readers to neighborhood leaders improving their communities, spotlight artists, entrepreneurs and educators, and report on innovative programs, community investments and creative solutions to local challenges — stories its editors note may never make national or even regional headlines but matter to the entrepreneur opening a business, the artist creating youth opportunities and the residents strengthening their blocks. Recurring themes include small-business openings, housing and development projects, public-space and waterfront initiatives, food businesses, arts organizations and the nonprofit sector.
The magazine's features and Q&As give it range beyond development news: an early profile of comedian Mike Polk Jr., whose irreverent Cleveland tourism videos had passed ten million views, showed the house style — take a Clevelander seriously, explain what they're building, and let the city argue with itself in the comments of its own story. Photography-led stories, neighborhood guides and development explainers under its "Breaking Ground" banner round out a mix that is deliberately more magazine than newspaper: reported, narrative and image-driven.
Audience and Reach
FreshWater speaks to Clevelanders who are invested — literally or emotionally — in the city's trajectory: young professionals choosing neighborhoods, entrepreneurs siting businesses, civic and nonprofit workers, and the region's diaspora checking in on home. Its editors say it addresses creative, highly mobile and curious people, and its free weekly email is the main channel for habitual readers. The audience proposition for sponsors is the same: readers who are deciding where to live, eat, work and invest in Northeast Ohio.
Its reach is best measured in influence relative to size. Stories in FreshWater routinely surface the people and projects that later appear in the region's legacy media, and its longevity — sixteen years of continuous weekly publishing in a market that has lost multiple outlets — gives its archive a documentary value: a week-by-week record of how Cleveland's revival actually happened, neighborhood by neighborhood, written while it was unfolding rather than reconstructed afterward.
Editorial Voice
The voice is advocacy for a place, openly declared. FreshWater's editors do not pretend the good-news frame is neutrality; they argue it is a corrective. In Cleveland, where national coverage long defaulted to decline narratives, FreshWater's wager was that chronic under-reporting of progress was itself a distortion — discouraging investment, migration and civic confidence. Its stories therefore lead with agency: who is fixing this, what are they building, how can readers join, visit or support it.
That voice has limits its critics occasionally note — a publication committed to the positive will not be where readers learn about a project's failures — but FreshWater's position in the ecosystem is complementary rather than competitive: Cleveland retains watchdog outlets, and FreshWater occupies the chronicler-of-builders role none of them wanted. Its own fundraising appeals make the civic case plainly: local journalism should reflect the people who live, work, create and lead in the community, and these stories matter because they help the community recognize itself.
Digital Presence
FreshWater is an online-only publication. Its website publishes new stories Monday through Thursday, organizes them in sections such as features, development news and neighborhood coverage, and offers a free weekly email subscription; it maintains social channels on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, where its photography travels well. The 2023 relaunch under local ownership brought a redesigned site — credited to developer Jon Thompson — that modernized the reading experience while keeping the archive intact back to the earliest issues.
The digital format suits its model: evergreen neighborhood and people features accumulate search value for years, sponsor messages sit beside content readers chose for its optimism, and the email edition converts casual visitors into a community the owners can appeal to directly when support is needed — as the Local News Day campaign showed. In that sense FreshWater operates less like a news site chasing the daily cycle and more like a membership community organized around a city's self-image.
Notable People
Karin Connelly Rice, co-owner and managing editor, is the publication's editorial center. Across a career of some thirty years she has reported on local community members and businesses for Inside Business and Cleveland Magazine, edited the Rocky River/Lakewood edition of In the Neighborhood, and worked as a reporter and photographer for the Amherst News-Times. At FreshWater she focuses particularly on Clevelanders making positive changes in the city's underserved neighborhoods. Bob Perkoski, co-owner and managing photographer, supplies the visual identity — original photography is one of the relaunch's emphasized commitments — and shares Rice's tenure back to the 2010 founding era.
Senior contributing editor Douglas J. Guth is another longstanding byline, and a bench of freelance contributors — including community relations manager and contributing writer Rebecca Cahill, an Ohio City resident who writes about the people and places making the city flourish — produces the weekly flow. The staff's continuity is itself a story: in an industry of churn, the people who relaunched FreshWater in 2023 had been making it, in one role or another, since near the beginning.
Recent Developments
The defining recent development was the ownership transition itself: the December acquisition from Issue Media Group, the months of behind-the-scenes rebuilding, and the spring 2023 unveiling of the new look under the slogan of continuing to highlight the people and organizations that make Cleveland a great place to work, live and play. Since then the magazine has leaned harder into reader support, telling readers the stories behind the headlines — the neighborhood leaders, artists and founders whose work might otherwise go untold — as the reason to contribute.
Its participation in the first Local News Day in April 2026, a national effort led by a coalition including Montana Free Press, the American Journalism Project and Press Forward, placed the small Cleveland magazine inside the national local-news movement's shared fundraising moment. Sixteen years after its IMG launch, FreshWater's trajectory — corporate model publication to locally owned independent — mirrors the path of many surviving American local outlets, with one difference: its editorial promise never changed, because the city it was founded to celebrate is still, by its account, on the way up.
