Community members needed to join sixth Cleveland Consent Decree Community Conversation sponsored by NAACP- Cleveland Chapter and United Way of Greater Cleveland: 6:00 pm, June 09

By Rich Weiss, for Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland

If you missed your chance to attend the May 12th public input meeting on the Cleveland Police Consent Decree, your input is still needed for the upcoming Consent Decree Community Conversation at 6:00 pm on June 9 (on Zoom).  This public meeting (co-sponsored by the local chapters of the United Way and NAACP) seeks your opinions and questions on progress of the Cleveland Division of Police in the areas of Families and Communities Building Resilience.

Rosie Palfy, who is a a community advocate, a homeless advocate, a veterans advocate, and a member of the city of Cleveland Mental Health Response Advisory Committee since it was created in 2015, said, “I think that the event was really well received…and I’ve got nothing but positive feedback from the community. Strangers have reached out to me on social media, and it’s a small world out there. So somebody knows somebody, who knows me and they send me an email, and so I’m really glad I participated in it and I actually felt empowered afterwards. I was very pleasantly surprised at how it went.”

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Community members needed to join fifth Cleveland Consent Decree Community Conversation sponsored by NAACP- Cleveland Chapter and United Way of Greater Cleveland: 6:00 pm, May 12

By Rich Weiss, for Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland

If you missed your chance to attend the April 15th public input meeting on the Cleveland Police Consent Decree, your input is still needed for the upcoming Consent Decree Community Conversation at 6:00 pm on May 12 (on Zoom).  This public meeting (co-sponsored by the local chapters of the United Way and NAACP) seeks your opinions and questions on progress of the Cleveland Division of Police in the areas of Crisis Intervention and Officer Wellness.

According to Roger Smith, Administrator of Cleveland’s Office of Professional Standards, “It’s really what the grassroots wants that should be driving this train.  It’s important for public figures and people who work in public agencies to understand with clarity what it is the community wants, here—what role they want the police to play in their communities and what kind of rules do they want to govern those interactions.  The only way to find that out is to get it from the community.”

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Rather than ‘flatten the curve’ it is time to ‘crush the curve’

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This story was sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative, which is composed of 20-plus Northeast Ohio news outlets including Profile News Ohio and several other Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland member outlets.

by Rich Weiss and Julia Bejjani

The colder weather has brought with it the predicted spike in new coronavirus cases to the State of Ohio—and the rest of the world—as we all gather more closely, indoors.

In recent weeks, news about vaccine trial progress has brought hope to a coronavirus pandemic-weary global population—particularly those coping with the loss of family, friends, and colleagues to the lethal virus.

The fatigue of this pandemic, mixed with a seemingly insurmountable surge in new cases this fall, plus the hope of vaccines on the horizon, all together could lull us into relaxing our fight to contain coronavirus just as we reach our most dangerous levels of community spread.

Jade Khalife, MD, MPH, MSc., health systems practitioner and researcher for Lebanon’s Joint Health Systems Research project, is arguing that the time is now for Lebanon—and the world—to replicate a set of coronavirus containment policies, called, “crushing the curve,” which show better results than the more widely adopted “flattening the curve” policies.

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Your Voice Ohio-Bliss Institute Poll Results

Ohio Voters for Biden Worry about Coronavirus; those for Trump Worry about the Economy

by Liz Skalka

The Blade

A new poll that shows President Donald Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in Ohio also reveals that Mr. Biden’s “strong” supporters here outnumber Mr. Trump’s, a snapshot of the state less than 100 days from an election that will determine whether Ohio continues its unmatched swing-state streak.

The poll also revealed the issues motivating each candidates’ backers: Mr. Biden’s identified coronavirus as their top concern, while Mr. Trump’s said it was the economy in a year defined by a global pandemic, economic uncertainty, and a reckoning over racial justice.

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The new landscape for local news

NCMA-CLE member outlets hold roundtable discussions with local news-makers like Mayor Frank Jackson, here pictured at a December 13 small media conference on the new location for the Cleveland Police Department headquarters building (photo by Neighborhood Media).

By R.T. Andrews

Republished from The Real Deal Press

If you are going to be scooped on your own story, it’s likely best when a friend does it.

There is so much happening of grisly consequence these days — from the health, economic and civic ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic and the absolutely horrendous response thereto by so many of our leaders on every level; to what has quickly shaped up to the largest public corruption scheme in Ohio history; to the quiet federal invasion of our city; to the ongoing crises in city administration; to the sense of possibility that exists in this moment of racial recalibration — we might be forgiven for failing to report on a couple of matters right in our back yard.

The first of these neighborhood items is captured in this piece by Jay Miller, longtime Crain’s reporter, and one of a dwindling core of Cleveland journalists possessed of institutional memory. The local daily newspaper, the Plain Dealer, died unceremoniously a few months ago, intentionally deprived by its absentee owner over several years of the resources it needed to sustain and reinvent itself. For the moment, its shell is being inhabited by cleveland.com, a digital news site that currently uses the PD nameplate to imply a false continuity with a bygone era. [It’s reminiscent of when the Modell Browns slunk off to Baltimore; the NFL team’s records and colors stayed behind, but the replacement squad that arrived a few years later still bears no resemblance to the original.]

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Facebook Grant Awarded to NCMA-CLE Member Erie Chinese Journal

The Erie Chinese Journal was granted $64,998 from the Facebook Journalism Project to inform our local Chinese communities throughout the COVID-10 outbreak.

by Neighborhood Media Foundation

Late on Thursday, May 7, Facebook announced the Erie Chinese Journal was awarded a COVID-19 Local News Relief Fund Grant from the Facebook Journalism Project (FJP) Community Network Grant Program.  

The Chinese newspaper, which has its headquarters in Cleveland, is one of only 144 media outlets to be awarded a grant across the US from FJP, of which only four were located in Ohio.

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News Organizations in Northeast Ohio Consider Collaboration…and Your Suggestions

By George Rodrigue, Plain Dealer FROM THE EDITOR | 11/17/2019

Imagine that you wanted to cover the most important story in our community as deeply and creatively as you possibly could. Imagine that you had the resources of a dozen newsrooms at your disposal, from newspapers to radio to television.

What would you want to cover, and how? That’s not just a hypothetical question, and we’d love to hear your answer.

More than a dozen news organizations in northeast Ohio, including our own, are considering creation of a collaborative news organization. Together, the members of this news collaborative would take on maybe one topic for up to a year, aimed at finding solutions to persistent problems.

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