Cleveland.com / The Plain Dealer

What you're reading

Cleveland.com is the digital news brand operated by Advance Ohio, the Advance Local subsidiary that consolidated the editorial operations of The Plain Dealer — Cleveland's flagship daily newspaper, founded in 1842 — into a single digital-first newsroom in 2013. The print Plain Dealer continues under its own masthead on a reduced four-days-a-week schedule, but daily reporting runs through the website. Advance Local (Newhouse family) also owns AL.com, cleveland.com, MLive, and similar consolidated operations across multiple US states.

Headquartered in downtown Cleveland with bureaus in Columbus (statehouse), Akron, and across Northeast Ohio, the staff covers Cleveland city government, Cuyahoga County, the Ohio statehouse in Columbus, the Cleveland Browns and Cavaliers (significant traffic franchises), the Indians (rebranded as the Guardians), public education, criminal justice, and Lake Erie environmental issues. Cleveland.com is the largest news destination in Northeast Ohio by reach. The Plain Dealer investigative team has produced significant accountability journalism, including the Pulitzer-recognized coverage of the Cuyahoga County corruption cases of the 2010s.

Ownership & funding

Advance Local (Newhouse family). Funded primarily through subscription + ads.

The Newhouse-owned Advance Local chain is privately held, which removes quarterly-earnings pressure but concentrates strategic decisions in family hands. The mixed subscription-and-advertising model creates two pulls. Subscription rewards sticky, distinctive reporting (statehouse, investigations, premium Browns and Cavs coverage). Ad revenue rewards traffic-volume franchises (high-school football, weather, crime aggregation, viral local stories). The 2013 print-frequency cut and digital-first shift put real pressure on local-beat staffing, and the chain has used shared services across its multi-state footprint to keep margins workable. The result is a paper that punches above its current staffing on Ohio statehouse and accountability investigations while leaning hard on SEO-driven daily aggregation.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places Cleveland.com / The Plain Dealer at Lean Left with a factuality rating of High.

Cleveland.com sits at Lean Left primarily because of the opinion-side voice and editorial-board endorsement tradition, which has long endorsed Democratic candidates in major Ohio races and runs columns from a recognizably progressive Northeast Ohio civic-reform perspective. The news report itself runs straighter than the rating might suggest — coverage of the Republican-supermajority Ohio statehouse, the DeWine administration, and Cuyahoga County government treats actors descriptively, quotes named officials with right-of-reply, and grounds stories in documents. Investigations on the Cuyahoga County corruption cases, the Cleveland Police Department consent decree, and FirstEnergy political corruption have followed the facts across party lines.

The pattern breaks where the news desk and opinion side run together in branded "What we know" or "What it means" explainers, which sometimes carry a recognizable progressive-civic frame on housing, healthcare, and education stories. Sports and weather coverage is functionally apolitical. Factuality lands at High because the reporting tradition is document-driven, the corrections record is clean, and the investigative team has stood by accountability work that drew significant political and corporate pushback — including stories that helped force the resignation of multiple Ohio politicians. The factuality rating reflects the news report, not the opinion-side editorial voice.

Editorial vs news side

Cleveland.com maintains the classic newspaper-style split. The news desk reports Cleveland City Hall, Cuyahoga County, the Ohio statehouse, and accountability investigations in a fairly straight register. The opinion section — anchored by an editorial board that endorses in major races and runs columns from progressive Cleveland-civic-reform voices — sits to the left of Ohio's median voter. The two are structurally separate and clearly tagged on the site. The contrast is meaningful because Ohio has shifted from purple to red over the past 15 years while the Plain Dealer/Cleveland.com editorial voice remained in the Cleveland-Democratic-Mahoning-Valley-labor tradition. Readers should treat the news pages as the basis for the Lean Left rating and the opinion section as openly progressive.

Why we include them in nwsly

Northeast Ohio daily; news desk straight.

Cleveland.com is the dominant accountability newsroom in Northeast Ohio, and Ohio is a major US state — population over 11 million, six top-50 metros, decisive in recent presidential cycles. nwsly uses Cleveland.com for Ohio statehouse coverage, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County reporting, FirstEnergy political-corruption case updates, and Lake Erie environmental stories that other outlets cover episodically. The Plain Dealer investigative tradition continues to produce accountability work with national-policy implications. Among Lean Left sources, it brings the Northeast Ohio civic-reform perspective that distinguishes it from coastal-establishment outlets, plus the labor-Democratic frame that defined the paper's audience for generations.

Recent nwsly briefs citing Cleveland.com / The Plain Dealer

Coming soon — feed from /today and /catalog will populate this section.