(Plain Press November 2026) What is a newspaper to a community?
It can be a guiding force for good.
Or it can be an overly careful guardian of the status quo.
I should have learned that lesson early on in my work as a Cleveland Plain Dealer (PD) reporter.
Joining the PD in 1965, I made two attempts to interview public figures. Their reaction should have told me that the newspaper wasn’t trusted by all.
I sought interviews first with a contingent of young people who had navigated from Michigan as members of the Students for a Democratic Society. They had chosen Cleveland to work to change society as it was in the 1960s.
They had located in an apartment on Jay Aveue on the near west side of the city.
My plea to do an article for the PD was rejected outright.
But they obviously wanted some contact.
They invited me to dinner at the Jay Ave. apartment.
An invitation but a clear NO on an article for the PD.
The second such event stemmed from an article I did before I left Connecticut in April 1965.
I had interviewed Robert Penn Warren. He had just published a book, Who Speaks for the Negro.
In the book he interviewed Negroes from around the nation, including a young woman from Cleveland. He suggested I seek her out once in Cleveland.
Again, I sought to do an article on Warren’s subject - Ruth Turner, a young woman, recently graduated from Oberlin College.
Turner was the head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Cleveland.
Warren writes about the tragic afternoon when a Cleveland demonstration protesting the building of a school that would be totally segregated. The protest was against building what would become a school attended only by black children.
Warren quotes Turner, at that demonstration saying: what occurred around 3:30 or 4 o’clock when construction had stopped and the police were attempting to send the mob home, and we knew they were angry… “They were justifiably angry – they had been provoked considerably by the actions of the police that day.”
The Rev. Bruce Klunder was a participating protester, said Turner, in a “supportive role. He had flung himself down behind the bulldozer to stop its operation. It moved back and crushed him, killing him.”
He and his wife, Joanne, were personal friends of Turner.
When I called Turner for an interview, she said she would talk with me but not for a story for the Plain Dealer.
That was the second rejection.
I did speak with Turner. She soon after left Cleveland for Washington, D. C.
I have wondered why these two early subjects agreed to speak with me but NOT for publication.
I recently looked back at my start at the PD.
Unlike today, the newspaper of that day had sufficient revenues to do what it cannot do today.
For example, each reporter had a scrap book. Every story one wrote was pasted in the book. A record of one’s work.
When I left the PD in 1968 someone gave me my copy covering two periods at the PD.
It is the only hint of what the cause of the willingness to speak to me but not for publication.
The Plain Dealer had begun to recognize it had long neglected a major portion of it city’s make up.
Thus, was born a full back page of the Metro section of the newspaper labeled as The Changing City.
An example headline on an article I wrote: “30,000 live behind Hough’s Invisible Wall.”
I suspect these full-page articles had sent a message: at least talk to this reporter.
The city, of course, is always changing. But, at the same time, remaining the same.
Maybe it’s time for another Changing City rather than more on the Browns and downtown.
