Cleveland.com Offers To Remove Names, Mugshots From Old Crime Stories

Northeast Ohio’s biggest news outlet is offering to scrub mugshots and names from old online stories about non-violent crimes.

Advance Ohio President Chris Quinn said people can ask to remove their information from Cleveland.com if they’ve had their records expunged in court. The news outlet set up an email address,  tobeforgotten@cleveland.com, to handle those requests.

Quinn said the news organization has long heard from readers saying their old mistakes keep popping up in search results, making it hard to move on and find jobs.

“It’s a drumbeat of these requests,” he said. “People writing in saying, ‘Look, I did something wrong six years ago, eight years ago. I’ve cleaned up my life, I’ve moved on, but any time you search my name, what you see is the story, mugshot, whatever of me about my lowest point.’”

In a column announcing the move, Quinn wrote that Cleveland.com will also cut back on using mugshots and names in stories about minor crimes.

“How long do you have to pay for a mistake?” he said. “In the old days, these stories appeared in print and were forgotten. Only way you could find them is going through microfilm or some newspaper index, if you knew where.”