On behalf of CoolCleveland, our writers, staff and contributors, I personally apologize for an inexcusable and inappropriate post that attempted to promote an event with a poor attempt at humor.
It is never OK to make light of such serious issues, and I take full and personal responsibility for this post ever being published.
We apologize to anyone who may have read this egregious post, to victims and survivors, and to the community of Cleveland. When we started CoolCleveland over 16 years ago, it was to help and support the cool events, cool people and cool venues in our region, not to cause further harm and pain.
We want to make it clear that Townhall is not responsible for any content in the post, and we sincerely apologize to the people involved with Townhall for associating them with this language and sentiment. We have personally apologized to the management at Townhall and are working with them to ensure that they are not further harmed by this post.
We are committed to doing everything in our power to help right this wrong, although we realize that words have power, and we have violated a trust with our readers and community. We have made a contribution to a non-profit organization that helps survivors and victims, and we are making arrangements for training for our writers, staff and contributors.
However, I want to reiterate that full responsibility for this issue rests on my shoulders personally. We have made immediate changes to our staffing. Although we had installed safeguards to ensure content review, we have now instituted a more rigorous internal system to ensure that all content published by CoolCleveland meets our standards and continues to help the community and promote the coolness all around us. Because this community is cool. — Thomas Mulready, publisher, CoolCleveland.