The Cleveland Plain Dealer, founded in 1842, cut 22 editorial jobs last week, reducing its newsroom to only 14 reporters.
Now, survivors say they are being yanked off their beats covering the city proper — while their jobs on the paper have been handed over to the younger, non-union workers on the digital operation, Cleveland.com.
The NYPost reports the reporters on the paper, which boasted a staff of 340 journalists two decades ago, have been reassigned to outlying suburban counties surrounding Cleveland, sources said.
Editor-in-chief Tim Warsinskey, who had been at Cleveland.com before getting elevated a week before the pending cuts were unveiled, has called the cuts part of a “company wide strategy decision.”
He told the 14 remaining newsroom staffers that they would henceforth be forbidden from covering stories in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, and Summit County and could no longer report on anything that might be deemed a "statewide" issue. Those vast content areas will now fall under the editorial jurisdiction of cleveland.com, the PD's non-union sister newsroom.
He also said the print and digital side would not be able to effectively continue as two different entities.
But the Northern Ohio News Guild, the union which represents 18 of the newsroom journalists who were laid off, said Warsinskey is simply trying to push out the union workers.
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