'Plain Dealer' Suspends Political Blog -- After a Resignation and Uproar

By: Joe Strupp The Plain Dealer of Cleveland today suspended a controversial politics blog that had sought to provide a different approach by using non-staff established bloggers, both conservative and liberal.

But when one of the two liberal bloggers was asked this week to withhold his comments on a specific congressional race after it was revealed he had contributed to one of the candidates, he resigned. That led to an uproar among other bloggers and some readers, which ended with the second liberal blogger stepping down and the paper deciding the approach was not workable with just two conservatives.

"A car can't run on two wheels, and Wide Open can't continue with only one side of the political spectrum represented," Jean Dubail, assistant managing editor/online, wrote in a note on the blog today. "So we're going to call an indefinite halt to the project and step back to re-group.? We still believe that newspaper and newspaper websites need to engage the new media. Our first effort in that direction obviously didn't fare well, but it would have been a still greater mistake not to make the attempt. ?Over the next few days and weeks we'll be giving a lot of thought to alternative ways of accomplishing the same end."

The suspension of the site, which first launched on Sept. 24, follows a week of ups and down, which included the two resignations and various critiques among Ohio political insiders.

"When we set this up, the idea was to find a way to engage the larger community, the Web-based community, the political blogosphere," Dubail told E&P Friday. "We wanted to create a useful, insightful dialogue."

Although the Plain Dealer already had a traditional newspaper political blog, "Openers," it was overseen by the paper's own political reporters, who were obviously limited in their opinions as journalists. "Wide Open" sought to give true bloggers that were not linked to the paper a place to create opinionated discussions.

"I had been reading Ohio blogs fairly regularly and I thought these four stood out, they did their own reporting and didn?t just engage in name-calling," Dubail told E&P.

Those four were liberals Jeff Coryell and Jill Miller Zimon and conservatives Dave Stacy and Tom Blumer. Each continued to write for their own blogs, but received a "nominal fee" to post items on the Wide Open blog at least once or twice a day. Initial Web traffic was promising, Dubail said, with up to 1,000 unique users each day and as many as 1,500 page views.

"Six weeks into it, we ran into the brick wall," Dubail said. That wall was the news that Coryell had both contributed to the candidacy of Democratic congressional candidate Bill O'Neill and had even promoted a fundraiser for him on his regular blog site. When O'Neill's opponent, incumbent Republican Steve LaTourette heard of those ties, his office complained to the Plain Dealer and even threatened not to speak with their reporters.

"That raised an ethical dilemma for us," Dubail said. "We discussed it and asked [Coryell] to refrain from writing about that race on our blog." Coryell declined and was dismissed from the blog on Wednesday.

In a note to blog readers, Dubail wrote: "Our concern was that since Jeff and the other Wide Open bloggers are paid, his views might be taken as those of the paper, which could raise legitimate questions about our fairness. Jeff was uncomfortable with that restriction, so we felt obligated to end our relationship. ?It goes without saying that Jeff did nothing wrong. His contributions to Wide Open were first-rate."

Coryell, in a reader comment posted after Dubail's note, accused the newspaper of giving into LaTourette's complaints: "Excuse me, Jean, but ...You do not mention the fact that Rep. Steve LaTourette complained to the Plain Dealer about me, and those complaints led directly to the questioning and to the firing. He interfered, I got fired. If the standard is now that bloggers at Wide Open must never have contributed to a political candidate, the enterprise must fail. Partisans are exactly who is needed. We are not reporters; you brought us in for the purpose of conveying our partisan opinions. There is no ethical conflict concerning political contributions when it is bloggers rather than reporters at issue."

But the uproar did not end there. Later the same day, Miller Zimon resigned after revealing she had also contributed to campaigns. In her farewell posting, she stated: "Given this ideal I have about integration or at least collaboration, the decision made by the Plain Dealer to tell Jeff Coryell that either he stop writing about particular political figures or he could no longer write at Wide Open leaves me feeling incredibly sad and more than a little discouraged about the prospects for news gatherers and distributors across the spectrum to be able to produce, together, content that readers want."

That left the Wide Open project with just two conservative bloggers. Dubail said the paper did not believe it could find liberal replacements who would adhere to the restrictions, and added that paying them might create an ongoing conflict for the paper.

"We believe the atmosphere had become super-heated over this thing," Dubail said. He said the blog may resurface again, but through an unpaid approach that would limit some of the potential conflict problems. "That is probably our next step, to review something like this on an unpaid forum."