[11] Their choice of name was probably inspired by The Plaindealer, a weekly paper described as Jacksonian or radical, published in New York City by William Leggett from 1836 to either 1837 or 1839.

[10][12][13][14] Several other newspapers in California,[15][16][17] Colorado,[18] Indiana,[19] Iowa,[20][21][22] Montana,[23] Oregon,[24] Wisconsin,[25][26] Manitoba,[27] and South Australia[28] later adopted versions of the same name in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

[10] On March 1, 1967, the Holden trustees, including Vail, sold the Plain Dealer to Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr.'s newspaper chain for $54.2 million, then the highest price ever paid for a U.S.

[82]) The original, older parent company, Plain Dealer Publishing Company, kept responsibility for The Plain Dealer (i.e., the print edition), only, while NEOMG gained responsibility for operating cleveland.com and Sun Newspapers (also known as the Sun News suburban papers, a group of smaller, weekly, more suburban-oriented newspapers in the Greater Cleveland metro area also owned by Advance Publications).

[87][88][89] The Plain Dealer News Guild also called NEOMG's formation evidence of Advance's involvement in "union-busting", and repeated the claim in response to subsequent layoffs.

[91] Quinn previously served as vice president of content at NEOMG[92] and was the metro editor at The Plain Dealer prior to that.

[94] Since the late 20th century, like other media business organizations, the newspaper has faced reductions in circulation and revenue; it has undergone restructuring and layoffs.

The editor of The Plain Dealer, Doug Clifton, said that stories that would formerly have appeared in the Sunday Magazine would be integrated into other areas of the paper.

[101] In August 2013, The Plain Dealer reduced home delivery from seven days a week to four: Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

[112] This concern was heightened when, within 24 hours after the layoffs, NEOMG hired away from The Plain Dealer thirteen of those who were not laid off, leaving 97 employees in the newsroom.

[115] The Plain Dealer announced plans to lay off a third of its remaining unionized staff in December 2018 as part of a transition to a "centralized production system".

Rachel Dissell, a vice president of the News Guild, addressed Quinn's remarks, saying "we are baffled how print circulation can be blamed for buyouts at a digital company that we've been told again and again over five years is a separate entity from the Plain Dealer.

[125] Their departures were delayed by two weeks, however, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to what was described as "a farewell blitz of vital reporting" on that topic by the soon-to-depart staff.

Although the operation had generated criticism, the decision to drop it was attributed instead to a desire to keep all content on cleveland.com rather than the separate PolitiFact Ohio site, which remains available as an archive.

These prices only apply to The Plain Dealer's home delivery area, which are the Northeast Ohio counties of Cuyahoga, Lake, Geauga, Portage, Erie, Ottawa, Summit, Ashtabula, Medina, and Lorain.

[138][139] At 7 a.m. on the day after the election, which Kasich who was endorsed by the NEOMG won easily, the news organization posted online an explanation of events written by its reader representative.

Further, "I thought that if I stated my reasons, the obvious next step would be people going to the candidates and asking them if they had any objection to putting the video back up," Quinn is quoted as saying.

"One of the questions these people raise is why a 12-year-old was walking about in a public place, randomly aiming what looks like a real gun in various directions, to the point where a witness called 9-1-1 in fear," Quinn wrote[146] in a piece defending his organization's reporting on the incident.

Cleveland Scene, the alternative weekly, compared Quinn's explanation to "digging himself a hole the exact width and depth of a coffin"[147] in a piece asserting that the narrative regarding Rice's parents' criminal histories "is absent any context whatsoever".

NEOMG's handling of the situation was condemned on a national scale by the Huffington Post,[148] as well as internally by Plain Dealer staffers.

"[150] The Plain Dealer has been criticized in the past by liberal columnists for staking out generally conservative positions on its editorial page, despite serving a predominantly Democratic readership base.

It also was criticized in the 2004 election cycle for the U.S. Senate, not providing fair coverage if any to Voinovich's opponent, State Sen. Eric Fingerhut, a Democrat.

State Senator Steve Austria called it abuse of the media access privilege, saying publishing these names would threaten the safety of the men and women who obtain these permits.

[153] The Plain Dealer made national headlines in summer 2005, when editor Douglas Clifton announced that the newspaper was withholding two stories "of profound importance" after Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine were ordered to reveal confidential sources who had provided information on Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson's wife, being a CIA operative.

[155] The Plain Dealer then printed its withheld story, a report that a federal corruption probe had targeted former Mayor Michael R.

[157] On September 17, 2008, Donald Rosenberg, The Plain Dealer's music critic of sixteen years, was told by the paper's editor, Susan Goldberg, that he would no longer be covering performances of the Cleveland Orchestra.

[159] In December 2008, Rosenberg sued Cleveland's Musical Arts Association, the newspaper and several members of their staffs, alleging a conspiracy to have him demoted.

[162] In March 2010, The Plain Dealer reported that about eighty comments had been posted to articles on its web site by an account registered to the email address of Shirley Strickland Saffold, a judge sitting on the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas.

[163] The revelation led one attorney, who had been criticized in the postings, to request the judge recuse herself from a homicide trial in which he represented the defendant.

[165] In April, the judge sued the paper, its editor Susan Goldberg, and affiliated companies for $50 million claiming violation of its privacy policy.