I started at The Plain Dealer as an intern before I was old enough to legally buy a beer and have been a full time reporter with my hometown paper since 2002.

I got the job, I was later told, because after being arrested while stringing a story on some riots in Kent with @gusachan and used my one call to phone in quotes from jailed college students in to the news desk.

For 18 years, the people of Greater Cleveland have allowed me to tell their stories, and often the stories were hard ones about crime, trauma or abuse by people they loved or systems that were supposed to protect them. And far, far too many funerals.

Some of the stories sparked solutions &changes to laws, policies, hearts and minds, including series on the sexual assault investigations & the testing of rape kits and health & housing policies that allowed the most vulnerable children to be poisoned lead, a brain damaging toxin

One story solved a murder, another was turned into a stage play and none of them would have been very good without the help of the most talented photographers, artists and editors around.

Reporting took me to places like Alabama, where I covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina while living in rented SUV (which got destroyed) and to Steubenville, Ohio, whose residents still call on occasion to cuss me out about my coverage of a rape case that went viral.

I got to help make @RollRedRollDoc and appeared in another documentary @IamEvidence. That led friends and family to suggest I cover some lighter topics. Instead, I wrote a series with @PDPopDIVA on a woman who was driven to solve her own rape. https://pdprojects.cleveland.com/case-closed-part-1-1-why-did-you-do-that-to-me/index.html

Some of my proudest work was with @BrieZeltner on the #DearCleveland series. We somehow convinced @PlainDealer bosses to give many pages of the newspaper to area teens for their pictures and words and song lyrics.

My hope is to continue to work on @WitnessProjectCLE a community collaboration with @95WOVUFM and @ward7observer1 #ReadingRamm @theebrianaelise launched earlier this year.

To people who have given me the unsolicited advice over the years that in order to “make it” I should leave the city for a bigger, coastal paper. My response is still the same: Fuck off, Cleveland deserves good journalism, too.

And it will still have that. I’ll still subscribe to read stories by @CanigliaJohn, @Steven_litt, @susanglaser and @terrypluto, columns from @LeilaAtassi and solid reporting from reporters like @CourtneyAstolfi @CoryShaffer @AdamFerrise & @AndrewJTobias.

I’m bummed I never got to break news with those younger reporters like I did with veteran @PlainDealer reporters who taught me everything I know.

Not all stories end the way we want them to. Sometimes there are unintended consequences that can't be anticipated. I’m heartbroken & regretful that the owners of my newspaper, in the end, didn’t value me as much as I valued the opportunity they gave me serve my own community

I'm proud to have belonged to @PDNewsGuild because reporters – which have now officially been deemed "essential" – deserve protections and rights and to be treated fairly by their employers, whether they are making wheelbarrows of money or not. #SaveTheNews.

Years of covering victims of violence, both physical and structural, have taught me that some anger can be constructive and transformative. But if not properly channeled it will eat a person up from the inside. I don’t want my Plain Dealer story to end that way. – 30 –