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Category: Neighborhood News

How the Neighborhood Media Foundation provides a collaborative blueprint for local journalism in Ohio

The Neighborhood Media Foundation has booked a series of exclusive interviews with Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson for small local outlets. (Photo courtesy of the Neighborhood Media Foundation)
Center for Cooperative Media

Republished with permission from the Center for Cooperative Media

Will Fischer

by Will Fischer

It’s not easy running a local news outlet in the middle of a pandemic. For the Erie Chinese Journal, a Cleveland-based publication that serves Chinese communities in the Midwest, distribution became a major problem. People weren’t picking up newspapers like they usually did.

Fortunately, the journal belongs to the Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland (NCMA-CLE), a collaborative of 14 local media outlets in Northeast Ohio. NCMA-CLE and its members share access to resources provided by the Neighborhood Media Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Rich Weiss to support small media producers.

Weiss saw that many of these small local publications were struggling with distribution during the pandemic, so he wrote and applied for a grant from the Facebook Journalism Project to help pay for new methods like direct mailing.

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FirstEnergy fights against disclosing more details about alleged HB 6 bribery cases

Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder appeared in federal court on his nuclear power plant bailout public corruption charges on July 21 (photo courtesy of Ohio State House News Bureau)

Case filings and delay of possible nuclear bailout combine to block Ohioans from learning more before voting.

This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism in partnership with the nonprofit Energy News Network. Please join the Eye on Ohio free mailing list or the mailing list for the Energy New Network as this helps us provide more public service reporting.

By Kathiann M. Kowalski

Consumer advocates, industry organizations and environmental groups continue efforts to learn more about claims that FirstEnergy and current or former subsidiaries may have financed an alleged $60-million conspiracy to make sure Ohio’s nuclear bailout bill became law and withstood a referendum attempt.

Yet opposition by FirstEnergy in two regulatory cases and in state court has combined with the legislative recess to prevent those groups and voters from learning more before Election Day.

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In Memory of Cleveland’s Neighborhood News Owner Mike Psenicka

Mike Psenicka at a Cleveland small press conference

Statement of The Neighborhood and Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland

Neighborhood & Community Media Association (NCMA-CLE) was shocked and deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mike Psenicka, owner of our member outlet, The Neighborhood News.

As the third generation of Psenicka family ownership of The Neighborhood News, Psenicka changed the shape of the newspaper and brought color to its pages; as a founding member of NCMA-CLE, he changed our shape and brought color to our organization.

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Childcare owner works 18-hour days to keep her business afloat

Stephanie Geneseo asks Maxwell, 2, about the letters in his name as she writes in on his space-themed artwork. Geneseo created a curriculum for children who attend All Nestled Inn, her child care center in Chesapeake, Ohio, using space and aliens to help them understand the coronavirus pandemic, including how to fight germs.

This article provided to Neighborhood Media Foundation by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom, The Fuller Project. Please join Eye on Ohio’s  free mailing list or the mailing list for the Fuller Project as this helps us provide more public service reporting.

By Rachel Dissell

CHESAPEAKE, Ohio — The children at Stephanie Geneseo’s home-based child care center dart around in astronaut helmets while they battle green googly-eyed COVID alien germs, using play to learn about hand washing in a pandemic that shows no signs of letting up.

“I want to make it fun so that it didn’t seem like something bad or weird to them,” Geneseo says. “We’ve done everything we can to make it as normal to their day as it could be,” she said in July after she reopened All Nestled Inn, her center in Chesapeake, Ohio. 

The return to caring for children after a 10-week coronavirus shutdown was anything but normal for the 51-year-old, known as Mrs. Steffy to the families she serves. 

Keeping her young charges healthy weighs on Geneseo as she works 18-hour days, watching children from early morning to midnight, to keep the business she spent 22 years building afloat. 

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Ohio regulators decline to force FirstEnergy to hire an independent auditor

The order agrees that spending should be open to review but first requires the company to review itself.

By Kathiann M. Kowalski

This article provided to Neighborhood Media through an investigative journalism collaboration with Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism in partnership with the nonprofit Energy News Network. Please join Eye on Ohio’s free mailing list or the mailing list for the Energy News Network as this helps us provide more public service reporting.

Regulators are requiring FirstEnergy to show that its Ohio utility ratepayers didn’t foot the bill, “directly or indirectly,” for political or charitable spending in support of the state’s nuclear and coal bailout bill. Yet that order is much more lenient than the state’s official consumer advocate had sought.

Questions about possible improprieties arose after former House Speaker Larry Householder, R-Glenford, was arrested on July 21. That case involves an alleged criminal conspiracy by him and others to pass House Bill 6 last year and then to defend it against a citizens’ referendum. The federal complaint and indictment allege that the defendants received approximately $60 million from “Company A” — apparently FirstEnergy — and its subsidiaries and affiliates.

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Project ACT: supporting approximately 1,000 at-risk CMSD children and their families

Wilber Argueta stands outside the Zelma George Salvation Army Shelter, where he helped organize online tutoring for 12 homeless youth this summer (photo by Sydney Kornegay).

by Sydney Kornegay

Sylvia Rucker has been a caretaker most of her life. As the head cook at Hannah Gibbons Elementary School in Collinwood, she prepares meals for approximately 250 students daily, and has four adult children of her own.

But when her oldest daughter died unexpectedly in the summer of 2019, Rucker was suddenly thrust into the role of parent once again.

“My daughter went into the hospital with a toothache. She passed away a week later, and left behind three kids,” says Rucker. “I realized I was going to have to start all over again as a mother.”

Rucker became the primary caregiver for her five-, six-, and 11-year-old grandchildren, all while working full-time. These stresses were compounded in the spring, when COVID-19 forced schools to close and students to stay home.

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Ohioans’ perspectives on COVID, economy differ based on life experiences

John Green, emeritus director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute and designer of the poll, said polling can help people better appreciate diverse life experiences (photo by Chris Montgomery).

By RENEE FOX

Warren Tribune Chronicle

When people make decisions in their everyday lives, they seldom analyze their choices by running through a checklist of who they are – age, race, income, level of education or where they live.

But that checklist is important, especially now, in an unusually tense presidential election as Ohioans try to understand how others think and as politicians and campaigns try to manipulate minds.

A recent Ohio poll conducted by the Your Voice Ohio media collaborative and the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at The University of Akron suggests that there is a great deal of agreement on the issues most important to improving life – COVID-19, the economy, health care, racial equity, income inequality. But those differences in demography – gender, age, education, religion and more – play a role in how those issues are prioritized.

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Local Media: a Place for Your Interests, Your Perspective, and Your Voice

Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland

by Rich Weiss and R. T. Andrews

The proliferation of fake news in concept and fact has eroded the most important asset any media outlet has: its readers’ trust.

In February, 2020, along with warning of the impending COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) pandemic, the World Health Organization warned: “The 2019-nCoV outbreak and response has been accompanied by a massive ‘infodemic’ — an overabundance of information – some accurate and some not — that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.”

Now, more than ever, informed and engaged communities are essential for a healthy democracy. Not just for conservatives, or liberals, or independents, but across the board.

A Pew Research study conducted from 2016 to 2017 found “Americans express only a moderate trust in most news source types.” That same study revealed an increase in the number of respondents who trust information from their own local news organization. This increase outpaced trust of information from sources of national news, friends, and family.

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HB 6 costs go well beyond claimed harm to public trust

Ohio Statehouse
(Photo curtesy of Eye on Ohio)

Here’s what’s at stake as Ohio lawmakers debate whether and how to repeal the bailout law at the heart of an alleged $60 million conspiracy case.

By Kathiann M. Kowalski

This article provided to Neighborhood Media through an investigative journalism collaboration with Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism in partnership with the nonprofit Energy News Network. Please join Eye on Ohio’s free mailing list or the mailing list for the Energy News Network as this helps us provide more public service reporting.

A bill to repeal Ohio’s nuclear bailout law has languished for more than a month so far, and signs suggest that House leadership may be angling to defer or stop such efforts as Election Day draws near. Lawmakers filed repeal bills soon after the arrest of former speaker Larry Householder (R-Glenford) and others in July. 

Starting in January, House Bill 6 will require ratepayers to pay approximately $1 billion over the course of six years for subsidies that FirstEnergy had sought for two Ohio nuclear plants. Yet more is at stake, even beyond the $7 average increase in monthly energy spending that some advocates forecast as a result of the law.

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