Is local journalism truly dying—or is that just the easiest story to tell? While trust in media falters and technology continues to reshape how we consume news, some local outlets are defying the odds. By leading with authenticity, staying deeply connected to their communities, and reimagining everything from business models to the role of AI, they’re not only surviving but thriving—building some of the largest local audiences in the country. On this episode of Can You Hear Me?, co-hosts Eileen Rochford and Rob Johnson sit down with Chris Quinn, Editor and Vice President of Content at Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, to explore Why Local News Still Matters (and Isn’t Dead Yet).
Chris Quinn is editor of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer and president of Advance Ohio. He started in journalism in 1980 in his native New Jersey before moving to reporting positions in Dover, Del.; Harrisburg, Pa. and Orlando, Fla. He joined The Plain Dealer in 1996 and moved into editing in 2002, holding a variety of positions. He hosts a daily news discussion podcast called Today in Ohio and reaches more than 200,000 people via email each week through his column, Letter from the Editor. Chris received a bachelor's degree in journalism from Temple University.
Rob Johnson: [00:00:19] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of the Can You Hear Me podcast. I'm Rob Johnson, president of Rob Johnson Communications. [00:00:25][5.6]
Eileen Rochford: [00:00:26] And I'm Eileen Rochford, CEO of the marketing and strategy firm, The Harbinger Group. There is plenty of talk lately about the death of journalism, especially local news. But the reality is, while the industry has been rocked by technology, trust challenges, and changes in how we all consume news, not every newsroom is declining. Some, like Cleveland.com, are thriving. [00:00:47][21.2]
Rob Johnson: [00:00:48] And this is a fascinating conversation that's why we're so excited for today we have with us Chris Quinn, editor and that vice president of content at cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer Chris at your newsroom story of reinvention in audience growth really stands out in a field where too often the headlines are doom and gloom we really appreciate you joining us today chris [00:00:57][9.6]
Chris Quinn: [00:01:07] Thank you for having me. I'm happy to talk about this. [00:01:09][2.0]
Eileen Rochford: [00:01:09] Well, you certainly write a lot about it, and I've been following that very closely. And I can't wait to dig into this because honestly, your writing has been some of the most informative for me on this topic, which impacts so many aspects of society. So can't we to dig in to this with you today, Chris, thanks for being there. Before we do so though, may I just ask for, I think for the benefit really of our readers who may not be the avid readers of Cleveland.com that I happen to be. Would you please just give a little backstory, some context for our listeners about your own story? You know, what kind of brought you to journalism and how did you come up through the ranks of journalism? . [00:01:50][40.3]
Chris Quinn: [00:01:50] Yeah, I'm a 46 year journalist. I've been in it since 1979, 1980. I had 20 years as a reporter in Pennsylvania and Delaware and Florida and New Jersey, and then finally Cleveland starting in 1996. When I started, we typed our stories on typewriters. And if you had an editor, you used markers and all sorts of things. So I've been there from the beginning. The original place I worked, the weekly newspaper in New Jersey actually had hot type printers in the back. So I've run the gamut from ancient to modern. In 2006, I became Metro Editor at the Plain Dealer. I finished a 20 year reporting career. I've been an editor ever since in 2013. I became the editor at Cleveland.com, the main newsroom in Cleveland. I've done that since. I'm also the editor of the Plain Dealer, but I've in Cleveland now, I'm in my 30th year. So I feel like I can almost claim native status. When you've been there that long in the news business, you have the institutional memory. So I can. [00:02:58][68.5]
Eileen Rochford: [00:02:58] Yeah, you do. You have me beat. I spent 18 years here before I left and went to college and on to Chicago, but back in Ohio again. I think you definitely have me beat. So yes, you are a true Clevelander. No doubt about that. [00:03:12][13.2]
Rob Johnson: [00:03:12] Okay. This is just so interesting because I think what you're doing is kind of throwing all preconceived notions kind of on their ear. And as we dive in here further, I know people are going to be fascinated to hear how you've been able to turn things around in Cleveland. So let's start off with something, Chris, really broad, broad question. And that is, how do you assess the journalism industry in 2025? And how has the digital transformation effected? [00:03:39][27.4]
Chris Quinn: [00:03:40] Well, journalism on the whole is in trouble. The digital era took away the funding model that had been there forever, that newspapers like ours could almost print money with the advertising model we had that the Internet came in and largely replaced. Many, many newspapers did not adapt, did not try to adapt. And sadly, there are many places in America, especially rural America, that no longer have a newspaper that covers the local news, which I think is very dangerous for the kind of government we have in this country. I think because many regional newspapers are owned by companies that have a lot of debt, they also try to be profitable by cutting, and the quality of the reporting, the quality the journalism just continues to deteriorate. Much of America, it's getting worse and worse at a time when we probably need it more than at any time in the last 250 years. [00:04:37][56.6]
Eileen Rochford: [00:04:37] Yeah, it's a tear. The timing is absolutely awful. There's no doubt about that. I think that's the thing that concerns most of us genuinely. [00:04:45][7.5]
Rob Johnson: [00:04:46] I think before we go on, I just want to comment on what you talked about, cutting your way to profitability, because it's not just the newspaper business. In my last years in television, that was a common way to do things too. You're not dealing from a position of power, you're dealing from position of weakness. I just remember bosses going around saying, we're not a TV station, we are a digital outlet, but I don't know at that time if they knew what that meant. And because, perhaps, the revenue model had changed so dramatically. Therein you know with as you just pointed out was where all the trouble started for newspapers and tv and radio i think [00:05:23][36.9]
Chris Quinn: [00:05:23] Yeah, and that was that failure to adapt and I think everybody tried to hold on too long to the old model while it's like holding the bunch of sand right at the Jersey shore. The tighter you squeeze, the more it falls out instead of trying to figure out new strategies. [00:05:39][16.1]
Eileen Rochford: [00:05:40] Right. So do you mind walking us through, I'm really interested, and I think our readers maybe too, that whole switch in revenue model that you implemented at cleveland.com. I guess I think as you described, it's where the newsroom was responsible now for generating its own revenue instead of the advertising that you had talked about a little earlier. What does that really mean? How are you doing that? What does it look like? How are you able to turn a profit? Just tell us more in details about that. I don't think that, you know, we know that's not happening elsewhere. And let's talk a little bit, I'd love to hear more. [00:06:10][30.3]
Chris Quinn: [00:06:11] Well, it took a while to get there. We're part of Advanced Local. It's a privately-owned. News company with markets in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Oregon, a few others. And the leaders of Advanced Local saw this challenge coming, I think, early and decided to get ahead of it. And it's only because of that vision that we're able to talk like we are today. So back in 2012, 2013, they basically set up newsrooms. In our case, we ended up with a second newsroom in Cleveland to really embrace the digital and ignore the print side, to put the print over with somebody else to pay attention to and say, okay, let's go. But it wasn't just the newsroom. We were hoping to get digital revenue with advertising and else-wise. For the first four or five years, that really wasn't getting us where we need to go. And in 2018, we were in trouble. We had a series of buyouts and lost a big chunk of our staff and the trajectory wasn't looking good and it's when Me, my colleagues across the country, the leaders of advance sat down and said, look, what if the newsrooms take it on themselves? What if we become the masters of our own fate? Can we look at the revenue that you can specifically ascribe to what newsrooms do? Apart from advertising, apart from any circulation, and make it pay for what the newsroom's doing. That was a radical thought. Never in my career did people in a newsroom think of themselves as the business. We were the expense. We spent the money the other departments raised. The goal was to try and get there by last year, but we actually got there by 2023, and we've been paying all the newsrooms and paying them for themselves since. And we do it, there's no one stream, there's no one answer. And we're never going to be able to say, we're there, we've conquered the mountain because new challenges arise every year. But we have subscription revenue, which grows. But we were not one of those companies that said we're all subscription, lock down the website, because we still get quite a bit of digital advertising revenue with the big audience. We have developed huge audiences. We have nine, 10 million people visiting our site every month. So those are two big streams. We also have affiliate marketing revenue. We have podcast revenue. We have little bits and pieces coming in from multiple directions. The subscribers to the digital version of our newspaper counts as digital revenue. And when you segregate that from, we still get circulation revenue from the printed edition of the plain dealer, push that away, that doesn't count, push away what our sales team is selling. We're doing it. We're looking at it every day. It's part of my job now as an editor to think about the business. And look at what our expenses are, and look what we're bringing in, and we're doing it. And what it's done is it's given the newsroom this great confidence that we're not on the edge of a quarterly report or a turn in the economy because we're doing it ourselves and we know there'll be challenges. Right now, Google is a big challenge in terms of traffic because of AI, but every time that's happened, we've gotten together and we've figured out another path. It's very collaborative. I don't think There's no way Cleveland.com could have done this on its own. It's as this team, we constantly get together, talk about it, and that's how we've gotten there. And it's all of the advanced local newsrooms that are doing it. [00:09:48][217.1]
Rob Johnson: [00:09:48] Can I ask a question about the journalists, because when I was one for very many years, we always steered clear of the sales department. We had a job to do to get both sides of the story to be impartial. The idea that I would be in charge of revenue, creating revenue for my department, would have everybody would just looked at you like you were crazy. How are you able to get, aside from self-preservation, which I understand, hey, we're facing tough times. We need all hands on deck. It sounds like that was part of the pitch, right? How are you able get these journalists who were always predisposed to stay away from the whole money, revenue kind of thing, to embrace it and to be partners in the solution? [00:10:28][39.9]
Chris Quinn: [00:10:28] Well, part of it is we we'd spent 20 years cutting and losing colleagues and everybody knew if that continued, we would no longer exist. One, we all feel pretty confident. Anybody that's worked in a newsroom feels like we can do this. We can pretty much do anything. And once you take that on, think, okay, let's go do this, it builds something. But, but don't get me wrong. There are lots of people to look at you cross-eyed because it's like, well, we're just here for the journalism. We're here to be the watchdog. We're here to be the informer. But the more we made clear, and we're very transparent about it, we do not keep anything back. The more we made clear that this is a path to the sustainable journalism for Cleveland, that Cleveland deserves, the more they bought in. And so we talk about it. We're not measuring reporters on the dollars they bring in. My job is to look at all that. Their job is to go do stories that people want to read. But... But they are aware that the care we take with our expenses and by constantly analyzing what our audience wants, that we guarantee jobs. We've actually, our newsrooms in advance have grown, I think every year for the past three years after years of not being able to say that. I started saying it last year. It's the first time since I became an editor back in 2006 that I actually felt confidence an optimism about the future, that this will be here when I'm gone. And that had been a paralyzing thought, that what if we can't do it? What does it mean to Cleveland to lose the significant voice? And so I think all of that is what gets people to buy in, Rob. [00:12:08][99.3]
Eileen Rochford: [00:12:08] Fantastic. I think we're going to transition into one of our very favorite topics now, Rob, are we? [00:12:14][5.8]
Rob Johnson: [00:12:14] I believe we are he was just touching upon it a little bit, but I wanted to fully and I resist. [00:12:19][5.0]
Eileen Rochford: [00:12:19] And I resisted the urge, you'd be proud of me. [00:12:21][2.3]
Rob Johnson: [00:12:22] I want him to fully express that. Before we move on to the big topic that Eileen's referencing, can I ask one more question relative to, in a business of years and years and years of contraction, losing colleagues and cuts and cuts, and more cuts, which is the way that So many of this. Who were in the business, some who still are in the business, have felt like things have gone. What did it feel like to be like, we're expanding. We have, we have figured out this model and it's not mission accomplished, jobs over. We know that. What was it like to all of a sudden, instead of playing defense, getting to turn and play a little offense? I can't imagine what that felt like. It had to be terribly gratifying. [00:12:58][36.5]
Chris Quinn: [00:12:59] That's exactly what it was. It was finally, we had turned it. And to be able to say, we're going to add this position or that position after years of not doing that, it was years of cutting. We're much smaller than we were back in the day, but that was, we are now on offense. And the topic we're about to get into gives us this unlimited horizon now, I think, to do it even more. [00:13:23][24.6]
Rob Johnson: [00:13:24] That is a perfect segue because it seems like in every episode now of Can You Hear Me, no matter what the topic is, Eileen and I, and whoever the guest is, have to discuss the implications of AI. You touched on it a second ago talking about Google. How do you think AI has impacted your newsrooms? What opportunities do you see for journalists that work for you? I mean, I know some… First of all, the conversation usually starts with, oh, they're taking away this job or that job, or they don't need this, or that, but you see it with with a far different, uh, focus, because... You're seeing opportunities left and right. So kind of explain how you pitch the whole, okay, AAI is part of our newsroom, but there are also some terrific opportunities we have to grow what we do. [00:14:06][42.5]
Chris Quinn: [00:14:07] Well, when we first started talking about AI, which really was about the middle of last year that we started to say we need to move in this direction hard, there was a lot of resistance. And this was across newsrooms across the country. I've talked to people elsewhere. There was the fear that we were just going to use AI to take jobs, which was never, ever discussed. It was never something we wanted to do. Although we all know that in history, if a robot ever could take a job, it did take a job. Our goal was to get away from that completely and use AI as a tool to do things we couldn't do. We're doing it in multiple ways. One of the worst hits journalism took because of digital is hyper-local journalism. You lost the ability in newsrooms like ours to cover local communities the way we used to 20 and 30 years ago, because it takes an enormous number of people to do that and it's expensive. We have posited that we can use AI to be the eyes and ears for us. That we can scrape lots of things from various websites in local government areas to be the flag to us that there's a story to go after. So we've moved into three counties that we have not been covering around Cleveland to try and do this. And we're trying to do it profitably. Can we get enough subscribers and audience in these counties to pay for a reporter to work it? And we're not there yet, but we are building that audience. We're getting some terrific journalism out of these counties now that is global. It's not just for them. And it's because that team of people we used to need to go to council meetings and go to school board meetings and look at all the building permits. We have that coming straight to us because of the way we've set up AI and the reporter can then use that to do the full reporting and go out and get the stories. Sometimes it's a quick and easy thing, but most of the time it takes the reporter to go and do the interviews and find out what's going on. It's very promising because if we can make this work, the geography we can cover can expand greatly and there's a whole lot of Ohio that doesn't get covered. If you have any questions about that, I can answer them or I could go to some of the other things we're doing. [00:16:20][133.3]
Eileen Rochford: [00:16:20] Yeah, let's hear some of the others like with how you utilize AI with your podcast is one good example that you recently wrote about one of your columns. Any other things that you want to describe, we're very interested. [00:16:30][9.6]
Chris Quinn: [00:16:30] The podcast is one that was a dream that we thought may work, and it's worked beautifully. We have four weekday podcasts, or five, four in sports, one that's news, and then some weekly podcasts that I've always thought that the conversations on these things are rich, but nobody on any of our other platforms gets them. Only the people listen to the podcast. We don't have the time to have a staff member turn those episodes or conversations into stories, but we wondered whether AI could. So we have a guy in Advanced Local named David Cohn, who's just a whiz at AI work. And I spent hours and hours and hours with him in the early part of this year, trying to get a tool that would convert podcast conversations into Stories we could publish. It wasn't easy. The tool kept wanting to focus on the news and not the conversation. But of course we already did the news. That's why we were talking about it on the podcast. So we find all of a sudden one day the light went on, it worked. And those things have taken off. We have a far bigger audience for our podcasts in those stories now publishing 45-55 a week than we had just through the audio. In five months we got five million views on those podcast posts and it's just given us a much bigger audience for a lot of the brands we have. I mean if that plays out that's 12 million views a year which is a significant percentage and we need them because. AI also has challenges that have taken some away. The other thing that we've started doing, it's maybe in the last five, six weeks. When I was a young reporter, whenever I did a story, my editor would pull me aside the next day and say, okay, where do we take the story next? You had daily conversations about adding perspective to breaking news stories or whatever. As we lost reporters, as staffs got cut, those went away because you always had the next to do there wasn't time. AI has changed that overnight. We can very easily come up with angles to add to a story. Use the AI to ingest it all and kick out a draft of a different story, a richer story like we used to do that the reporter then goes through, cleans up, and puts into their voice and gets up in a half hour. Whereas if we tried to do that follow in the old days, it would have taken an entire day. So we're getting back to richer content, more content, with a modest amount of effort, and it's still all our work. Sometimes it's taking a story from our archives that can inform the present day story. Another time you'll get some government data, population data, something, and then say to the AI, okay, rewrite this story from the perspective of what happened 20 years ago. And I'm loving what I'm seeing, and so are the readers. Some of those follow-up stories have much bigger audiences than the originals. So it's a plus for the reader. [00:19:29][179.1]
Eileen Rochford: [00:19:30] Yeah. And I think you also may have written about that you've used AI to even help you find stories that you should be pursuing. Is that accurate? [00:19:38][8.5]
Chris Quinn: [00:19:38] Yeah, we are. We are scraping lots and lots of websites now and having the AI help us identify the stories that we might want to pursue. Look, one of the things we did with it that was daunting, it would have taken us weeks or more than a month to do with just a person, but we wanted to catalog all of Donald Trump's executive orders to a certain point. I think goes in June. Using AI to help encapsulate all that just saved huge amounts of time. The readers have been asking us for it. I'd received multiple requests from readers on how to do it. And we could do it only because of AI. And if I could say one other thing about the readers, I send out a text message each day to 3,100, 3,200 people that subscribe about what we're working on in the newsroom or questions we're trying to ask. Once in a while, I'll ask the folks on that text message, hey, what do you think about X? And I'll get 600, 700 responses on the days where I get well over a thousand. And AI helps me put those together for a story we publish saying this is what people are telling us about that topic. It's the best reader engagement you can have. People answer the question in large numbers. They see their sentiments conveyed. Everybody feels like part of the conversation. And I couldn't do that. I couldn't go through 600 responses and write a story about that with all I have on my plate every day. It's just a wonderful tool. [00:21:14][95.5]
Eileen Rochford: [00:21:14] Right. These are great examples of how to use it in journalism. I love it. I think one of the things we wanted to address in greater detail and there on our chat with you today, Chris, is that that big narrative that journalism is dying, truly, and particularly at the local level. And I think most people have just accepted that, that that's kind of now a way of life for us. What do you wish more people understood about what's actually behind what's happening, I guess, behind the scenes, particularly with Cleveland.com? How are you demonstrating and proving, I guess, that local news is frankly more important than ever? Yeah. [00:21:52][37.4]
Chris Quinn: [00:21:52] It's been frustrating that our message has not extended further because any newsroom could do what we're trying to do. And if you focus on the idea that we've got to work on these revenue streams to make sure we're sustainable, I don't know why that's not happening. Now I know that in some newsrooms, they also have a big block of debt that has to be paid. That's not part of our expense. We don't have a big bunch of debt, but but those newsrooms aren't they're still in the red. And I think that the trick is, if you're generating revenue, then your company may be less likely to cut because cutting will cut the revenue. That's what happens now. If things get tight, you know, we can say, look, we cut that position, but that's not going to save any money. That actually going to cost this money because we're a revenue center, that's a win for fighting back on expense cutting. And look, I get it. Tomorrow, we could end up in a bad economy. Hurdles will come. What I know is we'll deal with it. We'll figure out the path because there is a path for that. People want what we're offering. Now more than ever, AI, I don't know about what you see on social media, but there's a whole lot of phony information that's being built by AI now. And I think Trusted sources like ours will become more valuable as people realize they're surrounded by false information. It's gone up. The slop, I guess it's called, it's gone out incredibly just in the last few months. [00:23:30][97.7]
Eileen Rochford: [00:23:30] Yes, it has. Absolutely. Which you're raising an interesting point from the perspective of just generative search and what that is doing, because traditional search is really almost dead, to a large degree. And trusted sources like yours do have a huge influence in generative. So what are you doing to kind of seize on that shift? Is that something that you've been working on. [00:23:57][27.3]
Chris Quinn: [00:23:58] Well, first, it's cutting into summer revenue, because the people who get those AI summaries of our content are not necessarily clicking to see our content, and then they don't subscribe and we don't get the revenue. For a while, the search engines were saying they weren't summarizing local news, but I'd be looking for a link to something I wrote and I would get an AI summary of what I wrote and say, okay, they're summarizing local news now. I do think ultimately there will be some deals made. We'll get paid for that because otherwise that's just theft. If you summarize our data, you're stealing our data and you will have to pay for that. I think they'll want to because they're not going to want all that false stuff that's out there either. And for Cleveland area, we're hit. If you want to have the best Brown's coverage or the best, you're going to have to use what we do and you should pay for that. I think we're early on, but ultimately that will be a source of revenue that I hope covers what we're losing. Cause it's you, you clearly can see we've lost referrals from search because of AI. [00:25:10][72.4]
Eileen Rochford: [00:25:10] Yeah, everybody has, there's no doubt. There's one other thing that I wanted to just ask if that's okay. And that's about your perspective and what you see happening in the world right now. Tell our listeners about why local news is vital in, you know, a healthy productive to actually preserving a healthy, productive democracy or in any other, you know, areas of impact that you see that are critical. I'd just like to hear your about that. [00:25:39][28.6]
Chris Quinn: [00:25:39] From the time I got into this business, it always struck me that for the American system of government to be successful, you needed the independent media, the watchdog that stood on the outside looking in not part of it because the people who are part of, it sometimes do bad things, especially when they're unchecked, but having the spotlight, having some entity to ask questions is key. And I think the rise of what we've seen comes in part because so much of it has away. What really troubles me today is that the politicians today, the majority of them in my mind are not acting in good faith. When I started out in this, the people that were elected really did want to serve their communities and they generally told the truth. They would do spin, but they generally stuck to the truth and now that's gone. I mean, the truth is no longer anything anybody speaks about think about 10 years ago it would have been a big deal to be caught in a lie and now the lies flourish i i think the importance of journalists today more than ever is calling out the the lies and seeking the truth i i feel it's so vital to do what we're trying to do and we get hammered by it because politicians don't like when we point out that they lie but it's bad and i don't know how we as a country get back to respecting the truth I think people now accept that, yeah, they're just gonna lie to me, you can't believe a word they say, and that's a dangerous point. Journalism, I hope we can restore it using some of these tactics we've talked about today to bring it back to places where it's missing. [00:27:16][96.7]
Rob Johnson: [00:27:16] Having a revenue model that's going to allow you to survive and even thrive, that's a heck of a start. All these places are going by the wayside and they're up to their eyeballs in debt, or they're having all sorts of financial pressures. It sounds like you have gotten past, so maybe that's the start. So before we wrap things up here, Chris, I want you to gaze into your crystal ball and the pace of change that you've just spoken about has occurred so quickly. With that said, where do you see the news business and more specifically your news operation, say two to three years from now, that would normally be like, oh, that's right around the corner. And with all the change going on, that two to 3 years might sound like forever. [00:27:57][40.5]
Chris Quinn: [00:27:57] I got to tell you, if you had told me a year ago that we'd be doing what we're doing now, I would have laughed and said, that's not possible. I feel that there will be some major breakthroughs in the way we collect and disseminate the news because of AI. I don't know what they are, but I feel like they're out there and we're just not being creative enough in the we approach our jobs. I'm having a lot of conversations with the staff members in our newsroom about this that I can't see what they see. I have my prism. I know what I see every day, but I can't see what they see and how we might attack that differently. All I can say is I'm much closer to the end of my career now than I am to the beginning. And I'm glad that in my final chapter, I got to be in this frontier because this is exciting. And if we do it right, I think we can start to bring back. Journalism that has been on the wane. [00:28:50][52.5]
Eileen Rochford: [00:28:50] I like your optimism. That's fantastic. [00:28:52][1.4]
Rob Johnson: [00:28:53] Absolutely. So, Chris, we can't thank you enough for being here. Editor and VP of content at cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, we really appreciate your insight. You told a story that frankly, as a former journalist, I haven't heard hardly anybody share. So that's encouraging and it's inspirational and keep doing what you're doing. [00:29:13][20.6]
Eileen Rochford: [00:29:14] Thank you, thank you for having me on. Yeah, we were glad to. We really wanna help spread this success story so that other local news outlets might benefit. So hopefully others will discover this as well. [00:29:25][11.2]
Rob Johnson: [00:29:26] Absolutely. Well, that's going to do it for another edition of Can You Hear Me? I'm Rob Johnson. If you'd like to comment on this podcast or suggest a topic, please contact us at our Can You hear Me? Podcast page on LinkedIn. [00:29:36][10.9]
Eileen Rochford: [00:29:37] And I'm Eileen Rochford, if you like what you heard today, please consider giving our show Can You Hear Me, a great review wherever you get your podcast content, like Apple or Spotify. That helps listeners of our show or other listeners, potential listeners, find us and we appreciate your endorsement. Thanks so much. We hope you learned something today. [00:29:37][0.0]
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