Take the cleveland.com challenge!
On this fine gray Cleveland morning, I'm urging you all to take part in a form of culture-jamming.
I'm urging you to start participating in the discussions at cleveland.com. I'm asking you to defuse the negativity, add some thoughtful insight, and drain the cesspool of ignorance.
I've come to the conclusion that by not participating, we are committing the intellectual equivalent of suburban flight. That is, we are taking our intellectual tax base and fleeing to the fringes, to where people are more like us, rather than staying behind and trying to change things for the better. We are leaving what should be the epicenter of intelligent discussion about our region -- our daily newspaper -- to decay just like we left our urban core to decay.
I'm not asking you to be a cheerleader, to shout, "hey! Things are peachy keen in Cleveland! We have Iron Chef! Take that, cleveland.comholes!"
What I'm asking you to do is provide a foil to all the name-calling, the shortsightedness, the stagnant thinking. To engage in dialogue, to write your opinions in a way that makes others respect you -- and to encourage the other citizens of cleveland.com to respect each other. To provide and document information where there is only loud and opinionated speculation, well-intended misinformation, and outright lies.
We have to prove that there's a way to bring everyone to the table to talk about our city's problems without constantly picking at a festering scab.
You might ask, "why do I have to do this? All the smart folks online already know to avoid cleveland.com like the plague."
Well, maybe. But imagine cleveland.com as a marketing campaign for the city. As someone who moved away from Ohio not once but twice, I can tell you that the first thing I looked at before relocating was the online news site for my new town. Is the circus of negativity really the first thing we want people to see?
I think the answer is no. So please, take a moment to sign up.
I'm urging you to start participating in the discussions at cleveland.com. I'm asking you to defuse the negativity, add some thoughtful insight, and drain the cesspool of ignorance.
I've come to the conclusion that by not participating, we are committing the intellectual equivalent of suburban flight. That is, we are taking our intellectual tax base and fleeing to the fringes, to where people are more like us, rather than staying behind and trying to change things for the better. We are leaving what should be the epicenter of intelligent discussion about our region -- our daily newspaper -- to decay just like we left our urban core to decay.
I'm not asking you to be a cheerleader, to shout, "hey! Things are peachy keen in Cleveland! We have Iron Chef! Take that, cleveland.comholes!"
What I'm asking you to do is provide a foil to all the name-calling, the shortsightedness, the stagnant thinking. To engage in dialogue, to write your opinions in a way that makes others respect you -- and to encourage the other citizens of cleveland.com to respect each other. To provide and document information where there is only loud and opinionated speculation, well-intended misinformation, and outright lies.
We have to prove that there's a way to bring everyone to the table to talk about our city's problems without constantly picking at a festering scab.
You might ask, "why do I have to do this? All the smart folks online already know to avoid cleveland.com like the plague."
Well, maybe. But imagine cleveland.com as a marketing campaign for the city. As someone who moved away from Ohio not once but twice, I can tell you that the first thing I looked at before relocating was the online news site for my new town. Is the circus of negativity really the first thing we want people to see?
I think the answer is no. So please, take a moment to sign up.
posted by Christine at 8:28 AM
10 Comments:
I used to comment there (no profanity) but I was banned after I commented on this story - "Tales from the Clinic 'Mothership' get nurse fired". I mentioned that most all purported health news is not from the paper but from Cleveland Clinic press propaganda and linked to this: "News-mercials: Don’t trust that dial!"
Whamo - comment removed - my user name denied access.
Christine, was browsing the Pee Dee site and found your link posted there due to this post! Great idea. Here is my problem; I get a password and sign in name, can use it for three weeks or so, and then it mysteriously becomes inactive or frozen. I do agree with your assessment and will keep trying lol. Here is link and congrats! http://blog.cleveland.com/pdworld/2008/11/what_local_bloggers_are_saying_4.html
Excellent post, Christine, but I have a few things to say. Your challenge is a noble cause, but I'm not sure it addresses the root problem. I fear the unfortunate truth is that the comments on Cleveland.com represent the opinions of a good swath of Clevelanders. Perhaps even more scary is that these folks take the time to not only read but register and voice their complaints.
I feel like Cleveland needs a bigger, better marketing campaign to get the word out about all the great things going on in the city. I'm not super familiar with what Cleveland+ is all about, but it doesn't seem like it's having much of an impact.
I really enjoy thins blog, but I wish there was a way to get the kinds of great ideas you find on here to the masses. I fear that blog tend to be too "niche" and oftentimes, the best, most vital information and most creative ideas get lost in the blogosphere.
Stop me if I'm ranting and being too vague here, but I think we need to do something bigger than just post on Cleveland.com, I just wish I knew what that something was.
Turk- I'm not advocating posting on cleveland.com as the be-all, end-all solution. I think part of Cleveland's problem is that it keeps looking for be-all, end-all solutions! And what we really all need to be doing is working on our own little corner of the world. I disagree that a marketing campaign is the answer. People need to find out about Cleveland bit by bit, by word of mouth.
I'm also not convinced that the opinions represented on cleveland.com really do represent the majority. Nearly everyone I know and everyone I've met who's visited Cleveland is positive or at least insightful about where problems lie.
What I do worry about is that the negativity and lack of, shall we say, constructive commentary, DOES have an influence in shaping people's opinions. If you're around a negative person all the time, your outlook sours. If you're around a positive person, your outlook improves. If you're around someone that's spouting really useless things to say like "Ugh, that's Cleveland for you" or "Once again, Cleveland has proved that it sucks!", how does that improve anything?
If this was just some random blog this was happening on, I wouldn't care. But this is the site of our DAILY NEWSPAPER. I really, honestly believe that the discussion on our only daily newspaper's site should represent a wider swath of Clevelanders, not just the whining, naysaying blowhards.
Christine -
You make some great points, and I can't disagree. Especially agree about the negativity -- one of the most frustrating parts of being a native Clevelander living elsewhere is hearing people constantly refer to us in snarky, unoriginal "mistake-by-the-lake" rhetoric, especially since that's exactly the type of attitude that is fomented by Cleveland.com-ers. I encounter the attitude even amongst my Cleveland friends... during my most recent trip home, this past weekend, I had to fight with my best friend to get him to ride the Rapid downtown (I make a point of riding as much mass transit as possible when I come home) and he wouldn't even consider taking the HealthLine.
I'm not really advocating a be-all, end-all solution, and "marketing campaign" was probably the wrong choice of words. You acknowledge that this is a big issue because it takes place on the website of our only daily newspaper rather than some "random blog," and I'm in total agreement. I guess what I'm saying is that there are a lot of great Cleveland blogs, including yours, but they are all so spread out and difficult to come by that only people that actively seek them out (as I have done) can find them, and these great ideas aren't finding enough eyes.
I think it would be great to aggregate some of the ideas found on these blogs and distribute them to the "masses," as there are some real gems that are going largely unread by the folks who most desperately need to read them. I'm not talking a link-dump kind of thing, and it's bigger than just commenting on Cleveland.com, but rather something in between that and a "be-all, end-all" solution. Perhaps a consortium of the best Cleveland bloggers posting full, original articles in one easy-to-locate place. Many blogs cover things that are outside of the scope of the PD but would be very valuable reading for Clevelanders.
Am I making any sense? I could just be rambling.
Well, there's Brewed Fresh Daily and Cool Cleveland. Or is that not exactly what you mean?
To your point about what outsiders think about Cleveland...my experience living in Montana, New Jersey, and New York (as well as talking to other travelers, mainly at bed and breakfasts around New England) led me to believe that most people outside the Midwest don't know or care much about Cleveland. (If you say you're from "Ohio", however, that's another story. They picture you smoking a corncob pipe while riding a cow to school.) Never once had the mistake-on-the-lake thing come up, and since more than a generation has passed since the Burning River, I can only conclude that the negative image has at least morphed into no image at all. Which could be good....
Yesterday I clicked on the new story about Hernando Cortez leaving the ballet and there were three comments. Today those comments are gone.
"Posted by tremonster on 11/18/08 at 4:54PM
DRAMA!
Posted by jujy54 on 11/18/08 at 5:06PM
heh! An arts organization that RUNS IN The BLACK, secures rights to Paul Taylor and Martha Graham works, with top-notch talent, and some of the board is pissed. They should thank their lucky stars.
Posted by thelike5 on 11/18/08 at 5:31PM
I agree with jujy54. Verb is terrific and continues to grow as an organization; both in sheer volume of their productions as well as from publicity side. I thought everything was going acording to plan..."
I guess my point is... who cares what's posted at cleveland.com? They don't seem to care.
If someone really wanted to know what is going on in Cleveland they would have to search for our local blogs. Um... the uncensored ones where posts are not removed.
My experience in DC has been one where many people I talk to have something negative to say when I mention I'm heading home to Cleveland for a weekend, and though it's usually something tongue-in-cheek, it is always indicative of their total lack of understanding of what Cleveland is like. Often, as you pointed out, these people equate Cleveland with the whole of Ohio as being part of some tractor-worshiping, inbred redneck culture.
I dunno, maybe it's just the disproportionate number of western Pennsylvanians that live down here. But as an anecdotal example, a foreign business man was in my office today talking to a visiting researcher from Pittsburgh. The businessman asked the researcher why he didn't just move to DC, and the researcher explained that his wife didn't like it, to which the businessman replied: "I don't understand how you could like Pittsburgh better than DC... that's almost as bad as wanting to live in Cleveland." So this negative connotation is still pervasive, at least in my experience.
As for my suggestion -- BFD and Cool Cleveland are both excellent, but essentially function as link dumps and aggregaters of information that other people have already written. I guess what I'm advocating for is something where people can click one link or type in one URL and get excellent reporting, commentary and analysis about happenings in the city without a) appealing to the lowest common denominator and b) forcing people to chase down links and click through several different things to get to the source info.
I suppose that doesn't sound all too different than an alternative newspaper, and we've seen how that has gone on Cleveland. But I still think that a unitary, online source would be greatly beneficial to the city. For example, I'm a huge fan of DCist living in DC, and many other cities have their own "ists." I'm guessing the only reason Cleveland doesn't have one of its own is a lack of dedicated effort. Do you think this is something viable?
(My apologies if I'm responding to something that was posted two weeks ago -- Christine, is it possible to log the date as well as the time of the comments?)
Turk:
"I don't understand how you could like Pittsburgh better than DC... that's almost as bad as wanting to live in Cleveland." So this negative connotation is still pervasive, at least in my experience.
Man, this kind of thing frosts me. I'm from DC, and it ain't all that. I kind of like the heat and humidity in August though, go figure.
More anecdotal evidence: I have a friend from DC who visits us up here very once in a while, and he says he gets flak from his co-workers every time he tells them he's coming up here for a weekend or whatever. He tells 'em that he's always had an enjoyable time here, and they don't really believe him.
Everyone enjoys having things they can badmouth without repercussions. They're loath to give them up.
I think the recent election has really focused the minds of the coastal "elites" on Ohio (and the whole rust belt, and Appalachia) in a pretty negative way. To them, Ohio was standing in the way of what they wanted to see happen, and it didn't make them happy.
Hi Christine, I haven't visited your site in a while so I'm catching up now.
I agree with what you said, and I feel the exact same way about Elyria, where I grew up and lived until earlier this year. The Chronicle-Telegram is Elyria's hometown paper, and to read the comments on their website, you would think we're all a bunch of anti-government shed-dwellers. It's one thing to scrutinize and criticize the city government -- certainly that's necessary in any democracy or republic -- but it's another to blame them for things over which they have little to no control, or to expect pearls from swine overnight. That's not to mention the eternal paradox of demanding lower taxes but increased services (but reduced bureaucracy). It's like we want a better city but don't want to pay for it.
I used to post comments there fairly regularly, but gave up because I just couldn't take the heat. That's mainly an aspect of my personality and subconscious when dealing with heated discussions online, though. Even being someone who lived in Elyria for 28 years, reading those comments started to give me a warped view of what kind of people lived there. But when I watch election results, I quickly realize that those commenters don't really represent Elyrians.
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