Thank you for being a mentor and friend to me. Thank you for this post. Thank you for trusting your instincts and Jeff and myself.

I will honestly say, Tim, that I never felt that I was in a bond so to speak - when we started out, there were no constraints. None. Only what we decided for ourselves.

I’ve made donations and so when this issue came up the very first time, I immediately knew that if pressure was going to come down on Jeff, I would go too. There was never a doubt about that.

What continues to be so ODD is that they haven’t and didn’t come to me and say, Jill, we know now that you also gave money - you will have to agree to not write about Marc Dann or his opponent or Sherrod Brown and his opponents. No one did that. There was no united front representing an even application of a standard that they seem to say is so…standard. If it’s so standard, then it should be like breathing, yes? But it wasn’t applied to us because there was nothing standard about Wide Open when it started.

I was never happy with the lukewarm response from the left, but I’m also not going to spend a lot of time nudging when I know how much I waive around my independence. I also knew that this was only about my interests, no one else’s, no matter how much we extrapolate.

So, now - we have an example of an experiment that failed. And the PD must take the hit for it. I honestly don’t think Susan Goldberg even understands what she’s done - and I think you make excellent comments to that effect here:

“I hope that Ms. Goldberg realizes that continuing to listen to the same advisors that Doug Clifton and Alex Macheskee used may be expedient but not prudent. The Plain Dealer faces a huge credibility gap in this region and others. If she truly wants to make this newspaper a stellar publication, she needs to widen her scope of whom she talks to in this town. She needs to include some new voices and not rely completely on the usual. In fact, she has a few on staff that would be good candidates. And if she sat down for a Meet The Bloggers conversation, my question to her would be why have advertisers and “leaders” of the community taken precedence over your readership? And if they haven’t how can you begin to convey that to the public so that your readership will be maintained and grow?”

Sigh. I don’t give up very easily, on people or on efforts, when they interest me, when I feel passion. I won’t be giving up now either, but I am definitely going to feel the scar of the battle for a long, long time. I hope everyone learns from it. Bloggers aren’t going away - and I believe the trust readers place in independent voices is only going to increase. Because with moves like this from the PD, the erosion of trust for such entities only continues to erode.

The financial model of the newspaper seems compromised from the get-go these days; how do we fix that?