Situated on the shores of Lake Erie halfway between Toledo and Cleveland, Sandusky lost 3.3 percent of its population over the past decade. With a median owner-occupied home value of $87,900, nearly $50,000 below the state average, as well as a comparably low percentage of workers holding bachelor’s degrees, the city is solidly middle class. Lake-oriented industries play a large role in the area’s economic diversity. Sandusky has one of the largest coal ports on the Great Lakes, and its industrial businesses include foundries, metal fabrication, automotive parts, and food-processing equipment manufacturers. An investment in a public access waterfront also draws many vacationers looking for fishing or boating opportunities, and the harbor also hosts several national sailing events. Cedar Point Amusement Park is the city’s most famous attraction and is consistently rated the world’s No. 1 amusement park by industry association Amusement Today. Its parent company, Cedar Fair Entertainment, owns and manages over a dozen amusement parks, water parks, and hotels, and is headquartered in Sandusky.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
