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'''The Blade''' is a daily newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, first published on December 19, 1835.

Contents

Overview

Labor disputes

Criticism

References

External links

Overview

David Ross Locke gained national fame for the paper during the civil war era by writing under the pen name Petroleum V. Nasby. Writing under the pen name, Locke wrote satires ranging on topics from slavery to the Civil War to temperance. President Abraham Lincoln was fond of the Nasby satires and sometimes quoted them. In 1867 Locke bought ''The Blade''.
In 2004 ''The Blade'' won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting with a series of stories entitled "Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths". The story brought to light the story of the Tiger Force, a Vietnam fighting force that brutalized the local population. In 2006, ''The Blade'' was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the National Headliner Award, for breaking the scandal in Ohio known as Coingate.
Its current editor in chief is John Robinson Block, whose family purchased the paper in 1926 and who also own the media conglomerate Block Communications, which owns cable systems, television stations, and an Internet service network, Buckeye Express.
According to the 2005 World Almanac, ''The Blade'' has the 81st largest newspaper circulation in the U.S..
The Toledo ''Blade'' was named for the famed swordsmithing industry of the original city of Toledo, Spain.

Labor disputes

Members of several unions worked without contracts from March 2006 - August 2006. Over the course of August 2006, The Blade locked out over 25% of all of its employees. It has been reported on national news sites that approximately 215 employees remain locked out.^[2] Notable in the labor dispute is former WTOL anchor Jeff Heitz, who was the spokeman representing The Blade's management.

Criticism

'The Blade' has been accused of presenting "factually false" statements in order to push their liberal agenda.^[3] The paper has been called the "liberal media bastion in Northwest Ohio".^[4]
Despite often couching their arguments as "in the best interests of Ohio's taxpayers," The Blade's editorial board has often been viewed as promoting simple, regional pork barrel politics that would benefit Toledo with no consideration as to their expense or effect on the state at large. The two most frequently sought items on this agenda are the wholesale transfer of state government jobs from Columbus to Toledo and the shutting down of numerous programs at The Ohio State University and relocating them to the University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University.^[5] The latter has been viewed as particularly irresponsible as the prominent researchers and faculty at Ohio State would be highly unlikely to move, by state mandate, to regional colleges that are not members of the Association of American Universities. Were their programs to be shut down at Ohio State, they would most likely leave the state for another AAU university. A former lobbyist for Ohio State has commented that "clearly there was a very counter-productive attitude whereby at times you felt that Toledo and particularly the Toledo Blade would rather see nobody get anything than have Columbus or Ohio State get a little bit more than Toledo."^[6]

References

1. 2007 Top 100 Daily Newspapers in the U.S. by Circulation
2. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070529/blade_unions.html?.v=1
3. http://www.toledofreepress.com/?id=1471
4. http://northwestohio.net/cblog/archives/258-Be-labor-ed-hypocrisy.html
5. http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070624/OPINION02/706240302 Toledo Blade editorial 24 June 2007
6. https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/471/1/Asher+transcript.pdf Ohio State Oral History Interview with Herbert Asher

External links

★ ''The Blade'' website

★ ''Block Communications'' website

★ ''Story on Labor Disputes''