The Cleveland Press is in-print again. The city’s afternoon newspaper ceased publication in 1982, leaving 104 years of journalism and history in limbo. This month, Cleveland State University announced that the archive has finally been digitized into a searchable format.
The owners of the Press donated the archive to CSU in 1983. Starting in the 1990s, many photographs were digitized as part of the Cleveland Memory Project. Everything else had to wait until 2021, when the library partnered with Newspapers.com to scan the material.
Marsha Miles is interim director of the Michael Schwartz Library at CSU. She said they get frequent requests for Press material from authors working on historical pieces as well as family researchers. Previously, the paper could only be accessed on campus by searching through fragile microfiche or decaying newsprint. Now, the Press will be online alongside the archive of its rival, the Plain Dealer.
“They were covering similar stories or the same stories but they had different reporting methods - a little different detail that you'll find in one paper or the other,” she said. “It is important to capture a different perspective of the time.”
Why preserve both? Kristen Hare, the Poynter Institute's Director of Craft and Local News, said it leaves something beyond social media for future generations. In a 2022 interview with Ideastream Public Media, she reflected on the importance of news archives amid the closures of the Youngstown Vindicator and the Akron Devil Strip newspapers.
“In the immediate moment, journalism is the first draft of history,” Hare said. “When that is purely digital or isn't being collected and archived… you risk losing that memory and the context, the threads of history that tie everything together.”
