Ken Schneck is still getting used to how his work is received.
As the editor of The Buckeye Flame, a news organization centered on LGBTQ issues in an era of Republican-authored laws regarding drag shows and transgender children, he and his staff get their share of feedback.
Sometimes it’s in the form of a state legislator describing him as a bully.
“I admire my colleagues who are able to say ‘Don’t take this personally.’ But the vast majority of people writing for The Buckeye Flame aren’t just writers and journalists, but they also are members of the LGBTQ+ community,” says Schneck, who is gay. “So this work is inherently personal for me and for everyone working with The Buckeye Flame.”
If this sounds serious, it is. But Schneck punctuates his story and those of others with an upbeat attitude that sometimes belies that seriousness.
He founded the news outlet in June 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, the website, which proudly touts itself as the only publication exclusively tailored to LGBTQ issues in Ohio, has made a name for itself through its dogged coverage and wide reach by encouraging other outlets to “steal” their stories and put them on their websites.
Schneck, a New Jersey native, moved to Cleveland in 2013 to take a job as a professor of leadership in higher education at Baldwin Wallace University, where he teaches classes on student development theory, diversity in higher education and ethical leadership and public policy in higher education.
He was previously dean of students and chief student affairs officer at the now-closed Marlboro College in Vermont, a job of which he grew weary. “I really just woke up one day and I did not want to be an administrator ever again,” he says, “so I moved to the dark side of the house, to the faculty side.”
He also hosted the syndicated program This Show Is So Gay for a decade. In between, he freelanced for outlets in Ohio and across the country (including in Cleveland Magazine) which ultimately led him to The Buckeye Flame. The outlet is still growing three years later.
“There’s a narrative thread that runs through every single thing that I do, that is trying to amplify stories that are not being amplified,” Schneck says. “That’s what I do as a professor, that’s what I do as a journalist, it’s what I do hosting burlesque shows in Cleveland.”
The site covers a variety of topics, from the 2021 killing of Cleveland transgender woman Tierramarie Lewis, to the effects of legislation at local school boards, city councils and the Ohio General Assembly. With that coverage has come a spike in readership
and an outsized profile, but Schneck, whose bylines are all over the site, says he’s most proud that he can show that stories have made a difference. He wants to shine a light, whether it’s on an LGBTQ candidate struggling to get their
message out there, or the nonprofit that isn’t doing well financially.
The work has brought him accolades. Schneck in 2021 was awarded the Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for the LGBTQ Journalist of the Year from the NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists.
“I also tell anyone who will listen: This is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life, to date,”
Schneck says.
Ken recommends:
The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts by Andrew E. Stoner: “Randy Shilts is my hero. He is my journalistic hero, and so learning about him and him writing unpopular articles about the LGBTQ+ community at the start of the AIDS crisis informs so much of my work.”
The West Wing: “I do sometimes suffer from delusions that The West Wing is the real world and get confused about what’s happening in the real world because I think they’re storylines on The West Wing.”
Any story by Neda Ulaby, Arts Desk of NPR.
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