Health & Fitness
The self-inflicted contraction of Cleveland — and its newspaper
By Tom Blumer | for Watchdog.org
Last week, just before converting to a four-day home delivery schedule, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reduced its newsroom staff by “about one-third,” telling “about 45 reporters, photographers, designers, editors and clerks … that they no longer had jobs.”
It is far from coincidental to the Plain Dealer’s transformation into a mere shell of its former self that the city of Cleveland, other than Detroit, has during the past six decades arguably been the nation’s most consistently troubled large city.
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The city’s population in 2010 was only 397,000, making it the 45th-largest city in theU.S. That’s a 57 percent decline from 1950, when it was the nation’s seventh-largest, and a shocking 17 percent lower than just a decade earlier. By mid-2012, just two years later, another 5,900 Cleveland residents had voted with their feet — to become former Cleveland residents.
To the city’s credit, its financial footing seems to have improved. But it still faces a horrible reputation problem caused by several high-profile crimes; an extraordinary number of homes either in foreclosure, abandoned, or both; a general crime problem which makes it the 10th most dangerous city in the U.S.; awful, scandal-plagued schools; and a household poverty rate of over one-third.