The Plain Dealer is Cleveland's sole remaining daily newspaper, after The Cleveland Press, the PD's principal competition, folded in 1982. The Plain Dealer has been around since 1842.

As a daily, the Plain Dealer is one of the nation's more well respected newspapers. The PD employs a modern styling of the print daily, as opposed to the more traditional broadsheet stylings of say The New York Times and Washington Post. However the PD is by no means a fluff paper.

The Dealer has excellent columnists, including Connie Schultz, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for commentary. Other notables are Sam Fulwood III, Bud Shaw, and Brent Larkin, who doubles as editorial page director.

The Dealer excells in Cleveland-area coverage, as it is their home city. The metro section is well done, both journalistically and stylistically. The reporters focus on both metro issues specific to Cleveland and take national stories and relate them to the greater Northeast Ohio area.

As far as criticism, my biggest issue with the PD is that they rely on outside writers for their main section way too much. The "front page" and main news section is often full of stories written by the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Associated Press. The PD needs to focus some of its staff on writing Plain Dealer-specific stories relating to national events, and relying less on generic AP reports of non-Cleveland stories.

Overall, The Plain Dealer is a solid daily newspaper that serves its readers well. The readers are voting with their subscriptions, as the PD is not only a top 20 newspaper in the US by circulation, but enjoys the rankings of #1 in sunday newspaper readership percentage and #2 in daily readership (as measured by the percentage of total adults in the metro area that read the paper), the latter being second only to metro New York City.

Recommended: Yes

Describe the newspaper's political views: It is liberal