16 Facts About Plain Dealer

Plain Dealer is the major newspaper of Cleveland, Ohio, United States.

Until 1967, the paper's publishing company, The Plain Dealer Publishing Company, was part of the Forest City Publishing Company, which published the Cleveland News until its closing in 1960.

Plain Dealer has been the sole major newspaper for Cleveland and Northeast Ohio since its two main twentieth-century competitors, the Cleveland News and The Cleveland Press, closed in 1960 and 1982, respectively.

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.

On December 18,2005, The Plain Dealer ceased publication of its weekly Sunday Magazine, which had been published since 1919.

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In December 2012, members of the Newspaper Guild reported that The Plain Dealer management had told them that, after the January 2013 expiration of a no-layoff provision in the union's contract, it planned to eliminate about one-third of the newspaper's staff, cutting 58 of 168 union positions.

Later in December 2012, the Newspaper Guild endorsed an agreement with Plain Dealer management accepting the expected layoffs of 58 journalists starting in May 2013, but restoring some of the pay cut union members had accepted in 2009, setting a severance package, and minimizing future layoffs through 2019.

Plain Dealer announced plans to lay off a third of its remaining unionized staff in December 2018 as part of a transition to a "centralized production system".

On March 3,2020, The Plain Dealer announced that it would lay off 22 more journalists.

In July 2010, The Plain Dealer launched PolitiFact Ohio, a website that analyzes political issues relevant to Ohio and the greater Cleveland area.

The Plain Dealer is available all over the state at select newsstands, including in the state capital, Columbus, and anywhere in the US or world via US mail service, in which prices are higher.

TechDirt reported that the owner of the Cleveland Plain Dealer had demanded that the unflattering video be taken down.

Plain Dealer has been criticized in the past by liberal columnists for staking out generally conservative positions on its editorial page, despite serving a predominantly Democratic readership base.

Plain Dealer made national headlines in summer 2005, when editor Douglas Clifton announced that the newspaper was withholding two stories "of profound importance" after Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine were ordered to reveal confidential sources who had provided information on Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson's wife, being a CIA operative.

Clifton told the national press that while he and the reporters involved in the story were willing to be jailed for not revealing sources, the legal department of the Plain Dealer Publishing Company was worried that the newspaper itself would be sued and strongly opposed the printing of the stories.

In March 2010, The Plain Dealer reported that about eighty comments had been posted to articles on its web site by an account registered to the email address of Shirley Strickland Saffold, a judge sitting on the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas.