Ohio Valley Politics

There’s a new post up over at the Wide Open blog, but it’s not really anything that we all didn’t see coming. The Plain Dealer is putting Wide Open on an “indefinite halt” while they consider how to proceed.

Here’s the announcement;

A car can’t run on two wheels, and Wide Open can’t continue with only one side of the political spectrum represented. So we’re going to call an indefinite halt to the project and step back to regroup.

We still believe that newspaper and newspaper Web sites need to engage the new media. Our first effort in that direction obviously didn’t fare well, but it would have been a still greater mistake not to make the attempt.

Over the next few days and weeks we’ll be giving a lot of thought to alternative ways of accomplishing the same end. If you have constructive suggestions to make, please leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Finally, sincere thanks to Dave, Jeff, Jill and Tom for giving this a try.

Jean Dubail
PD Assistant Managing Editor/Online

Of course the Plain Dealer needs to realize that wheels often do fly off when you forget to put lug nuts on them. Translation: if they wanted to set rules they should have done it before they were off and running.

When I wrote my first post on this I included a picture of a burning bridge. I did this because it was the perfect symbol for what the Plain Dealer had just done with bloggers. I don’t really see how they’ll ever be able to work with blogs until they take some action to fix the damage that’s been done. For now it seems like they’re more interested in sweeping the ashes of their burned bridge under the rug, hot coals and all.