Michael Scott is currently the assistant metro editor for online news for Ohio’s largest daily newspaper, The Plain Dealer, and news website, cleveland.com. He coordinates the online reporting from a metro staff of more than four dozen PD reporters, working as a liaison between the veteran print staff and digital team in the newsroom and website.
He also has trained news staff in basic blogging, online video production and use of social media and online tools in news reporting.
Following a selection into the first class of the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism-Social Media Fellowship at Ohio State University in spring 2011, Scott became the newspaper’s first-ever online-only reporter. It was a position he helped create to begin bridging the gap from a historically print product to a blended print-and-digital news organization.
That increasingly digital focus over the last two years followed more than two decades of award-winning reporting in environment coverage, government watchdog and beat reporting. Scott was a winner of the 2010 National Headliner Awards, third place, environmental coverage; 2007 Associated Press honorable mention, best investigative reporting and 1999 Associated Press, first place in investigative reporting.
He has taken additional professional training through environmental journalism programs at the Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institute at Michigan State University, the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources in Wisconsin and Montana, the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland (climate change) and the National Press Foundation (meteorology).
While covering the environment, particularly Great Lakes issues, Scott began shooting online news videos, producing more than a hundred since 2007.
He had had previously been a news and feature reporter, and then editor, at several other Ohio newspapers since 1981. He graduated with a bachelor of science in journalism from Kent State University, where he returns often to speak to students. He also co-teaches a video-journalism at Ursuline College and has worked with high school age students in philanthropy and journalism programs.
