Roundtable: Brent Larkin, former editorial director, The Plain Dealer; Leon Bibb, anchor/commentator, NewsChannel 5; Michael D. Roberts, freelance journalist.
The Final Edition of Feagler & Friends
Veteran journalist Dick Feagler is retiring after 50 years of chronicling Cleveland feats, failures and foibles. His byline graced the Cleveland Press, The Plain Dealer, Cleveland magazine and a host of other publications. He also did lengthy stints on the anchor desks at Channels 3 and 5 and spent 17 years as host of Feagler & Friends on WVIZ/PBS.
Feagler wrote in the preface of his book Is it just me? that, “we columnists are strange egomaniacs all right. On the one hand, we bluff ourselves through a column of type pretending we have the answers to all the world’s problems at our fingertips. But silently, inside ourselves, we are cringing paranoid jellyfish, hoping that the world won’t catch on to how little we know or how inept we are at what we do.” But he soldiered on guiding us to a greater understanding of the world around us. He admits he still doesn’t know why his fans care about what he thinks. But they clearly do and that made him a local journalism icon whose columns are the stuff of four different books.
We’ll join Feagler and three of his closest friends for some reminiscing and reflection on 50 years in the front row of the tragi-comedy that is Cleveland.