Cleveland reimaged: changing news media images of Cleveland, 1985–2015

ABSTRACT

Beginning in the late 1960s, Cleveland’s public image suffered a series of blows. Riots on the city’s east side claimed the lives of a dozen people and the Cuyahoga River (briefly) caught fire. In the 1970s, deindustrialization ravaged its iron, steel, and auto industries, resulting in tens of thousands of job losses and rising poverty rates. In 1978, Cleveland became the first U.S. city since the Great Depression to default on its bonds. Between 1970 and 1980, the city lost nearly a quarter of its population. In response, business and political leaders developed an economic development plan that attempted to change the city’s image by improving its downtown. This paper analyzes the changing image of Cleveland as conveyed by newspaper headlines and articles from outside the metropolitan area from 1985 to 2015. The results indicate while the city’s external image improved as a result physical improvements in downtown infrastructure and tourist attractions, deteriorating social and economic conditions in the remainder of the city were largely ignored.

KEYWORDS:

• Cleveland
• reimaging
• urban regeneration
• tourism
• poverty
• downtown

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dr. Robert Legg for his assistance in preparing the figures and the helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers. Any errors are the sole responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors .

Notes on contributors

Michael Broadway is Professor of Geography and the former of Dean of Arts & Sciences at Northern Michigan University. His research expertise focuses on the meatpacking industry’s community impacts. He has studied small towns with packing plants across the Great Plains and Prairies. In 2006, he was a visiting Fulbright Research Chair in the Department of Rural Economy at the University of Alberta. He is a co-author with Donald Stull of Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America (2^nd edition 2011: Cengage). More recently, he has published articles on urban agriculture, efforts by Canada’s Tim Hortons to expand in the United States and the Slow City movement in Ireland.

John Broadway graduated with a degree in English from St. Olaf College, Minnesota; at the time of this research, he was attending graduate school in Akron, Ohio.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Northern Michigan University.