Why the Heights Observer is not a typical newspaper

The recent resignation of Cleveland Heights’ third city administrator in three years, combined with other discord at City Hall, has attracted more media attention than usual about the goings on in Cleveland Heights government. 

City council and the mayor are at odds over a range of issues, and the mayor has been called out in media reports by members of the public for allegedly allowing his wife to bully city employees. 

Cleveland Heights residents rightly want to know what’s going on—especially in what is an election year for mayor and four of seven city council seats. It seems reasonable that the Heights Observer would be a definitive source for information—after all, it is a publication focused exclusively on news about Cleveland Heights and University Heights.

Indeed, this is a source for information, but the Heights Observer is a nonprofit community journalism project, not a traditional newspaper. Here’s why: 

• We don’t have any staff reporters. Most of what we publish is submitted by community volunteers—more than 1,000 individuals over the past 17 years. Few communities can sustain a volunteer publication like this; we should be proud of that accomplishment. But the downside is that when news is breaking and developing, we continue to rely on volunteers to help tell the story. 
• Contributors are encouraged to write about people and organizations they work with and care about. A traditional newspaper would view this as a conflict of interest. But it’s the best source for the hyperlocal information we want to publish, and we don’t see anything wrong with it as long as any relationship between the author and the subject of an article is disclosed.
• Unless we have dedicated community members who want to follow and write about complex, developing stories, we are unable to provide ongoing coverage of stories that emerge over time.
  
  

None of this is by accident. The economics of publishing today are very different than 25 years ago; the Height Observer couldn’t currently sustain itself with the additional cost of even a small team of reporters. 

So, we built a publication structured for today’s environment. That meant parting with some old journalistic customs, facing our structural limitations, and mindfully building a publication that makes the most of volunteers and community activists.   

I’m proud of the product we put out each month, even while readily acknowledging that explanatory articles about multi-faceted topics—like municipal politics—is not our strength. 

Sometimes, Heights Observer’s part-time staff will step up to contribute articles. You may see my byline occasionally, or that of Editor Kim Sergio Inglis, or FutureHeights Executive Director Lee Chilcote. But it is no one's job to create content—when we do so, we write as volunteers. Instead, our roles are to draw content forth from the community, then vet it, package it and distribute it. 

As a result, I can predict that much of what the Heights Observer will publish about Cleveland Heights City Hall between now and the election in November will be opinions by residents rather than explanatory articles. 

This may not be a wholly satisfying disclosure to those who want to think of the Heights Observer as a local New York Times. But it’s a reminder of why we do what we do.