Mark Naymik
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, CLEVELAND, Ohio-Veteran Cleveland.com columnist Mark Naymik's departure from the online affiliate of Cleveland Plain Dealer Newspaper is being celebrated by Black elected officials of greater Cleveland, including Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and Ward 4 Councilman Ken Johnson, sources say.
A former Plain Dealer reporter, the veteran Naymik, who spent nearly two decades with the newspaper and its digital venue, announced in a departure column this week that he will leave the dot com and join WKYC Channel 3 News in Cleveland, which publicly celebrated its new employee but could not answer questions on what exactly he will do there, station officials saying only that he will do online stories and some reporting.
Naymik said that while he is changing newsrooms he is not changing "his love for journalism."
Cleveland.com editor and president Chris Quinn would not comment publicly on the issue, an indication that Naymik may have been pushed out as online competition broadens, revenue continues to decline, and his political enemies in the Black community keep piling up.
And while Naymik's journalistic talent has never really come under question, his purported impartiality in bringing the news has, Black leaders often saying that he and the Plain Dealer, and its online articles, have targeted them unfairly.
While at the Plain Dealer, Ohio's largest newspaper, much of it before current editor George Rodrique came aboard in 2015, Naymik stayed on Black elected officials, his first real target then Cleveland Municipal Court judge Angela Stokes, a daughter of the late former congressman Louis Stokes, Ohio's first Black congressman and the brother of the late Carl B. Stokes, the first Black mayor of Cleveland and of a major American city.
His articles and columns, that some of his critics have dubbed "hit articles," whether on Stokes or any other Black elected official, were highly critical, including unsupported claims that Stokes is mentally ill, a false allegation that other mainstream media bought into and perpetrated against the now former Black female judge, an unprecedented gesture that some Black leaders say was motivated by racial animus.
Stokes was ultimately stripped by the Ohio Supreme Court of her judgeship, her law license still intact, and for claims she was a nuisance, and difficult to get along with, and that she utilized too much of the court's resources and held court too long, small time claims in comparison to some of her judicial counterparts on other municipal courts in Northeast Ohio and on the common pleas bench of Cuyahoga County, at least two of them disbarred and imprisoned for public corruption convictions.
Naymik covered Women's March Cleveland in January 2018 for Cleveland.com, an event that drew some 6,000 people, and he did not quote or reference one Black, though Black women were among the organizers and were the opening speakers and at least six of them spoke, Naymik instead quoting White men from the group Indivisible Cleveland.
By the time he got around to demanding in late 2018 that four-term mayor Jackson, the city's third Black mayor, explain a period of absence from work for what Naymik said involved his seriously ill wife, and then just becoming obsessed this year with chronicling the expenditures of longtime councilman and Jackson ally Ken Johnson, Black leaders had tired of him, and Jackson has clout, and influence.
But he landed on his feet, as White collar White men often do, WKYC recognizing that he is an asset to Cleveland's mainstream news forum, like him or not.
Few Black heavyweights came to his defense, some other Cleveland council persons saying coverage by Naymik and Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer, owned by the New York-based Advance Publications, is lopsided and has been for years, the newspaper this year laying off a third of its unionized staff, including seasoned reporters, to cover operation costs, and due to declining sales, and restructuring initiatives, Editor Rodrique has said.
On the other hand, his supporters speak highly of him, most of them White, including the editor of the Cleveland Scene Newspaper, a popular and long-serving Cleveland weekly, the newspaper publishing an article this week on Naymik's move to WKYC and saying he is a cutting edge journalist with a wealth of sources and contacts and that his departure from Cleveland.com is a loss.
His advocates say he is brave in taking on the powerful Jackson, and Councilman Ken Johnson, Black leaders still saying the news coverage is often racist, and that Black journalists are simply not a key part of the newsroom, or its editorial staff, whether it's the Plain Dealer or Cleveland.com
It did not help that Black leaders are traditionally Democrats and Naymik was a key part of the Plain Dealer's news coverage team via an extensive and ongoing FBI and IRS county public corruption probe that has seen common pleas judges, former county commissioner Jimmy Dimora, and former county auditor Frank Russo imprisoned, among others, Russo and Dimora among some 65 county affiliates, mainly Democratic businessmen, who have either been convicted or have pleaded guilty to public corruption related crimes in the last decade.
That Democratic shake-up in a 29 percent Black county that is a Democratic stronghold, which was lauded by the Republican-leaning Plain Dealer and its largely White editorial board, was the impetus for a voter-adopted change in county governance implemented in 2011 that replaced three county commissioners and the county elected offices, all but the still-elected judges and county prosecutor, with a county executive and 11-member county council.
Those appointed county offices include the sheriff, county auditor, clerk of courts, fiscal officer, and the county treasurer.
Black leaders, led by the Cleveland NAACP and Congresswoman Marcia L. Fudge, opposed the change in county governance before voters adopted it in 2009.
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