Lake grad, Omori, earns prestigious honor

By Nicholas Huenefeld | Editor-in-Chief

The Press Club of Cleveland will acknowledge the 2025 Journalism Hall of Fame inductees on Dec. 3, which is able to embody 1978 Lake High School graduate Dale Omori.

The Press Club of Cleveland’s Journalism Hall of Fame acknowledges those that have made journalism matter in Cleveland and who’ve helped it survive.

Omori spent over three a long time as a newspaper photojournalist on the Kettering-Oakwood Times, the Cincinnati Post, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. That profession was adopted by a stint as a producer/director at one in every of Cleveland’s largest advertising and marketing companies, Adcom.

Omori’s intention, whether or not it was capturing photographs for a narrative in regards to the plight of Cleveland’s poor or making a private movie about his household’s love of Spam, was to open a window to a different world for readers and viewers. This aim by no means modified even when his profession advanced with the digital age.

“It’s quite a surprise, and I’m flattered,” Omori mentioned. “It’s nice to be recognized by your peers, especially since it’s for a lifetime of work. It’s nice to be recognized and appreciated. It was quite a surprise because I haven’t been in the news business for over 15 years.”

Following his time with Adcom, Omori started his personal enterprise, Omori Media, earlier than retiring in 2024.

“I was always interested in fine art, so I do some art pieces here and there,” he mentioned. “I still do photography. I still love photography. I shoot a lot of nature photography. I just do it for fun now.”

After graduating from Lake, Omori went on to finish his diploma in photojournalism from Bowling Green State University. Since then, he coated information and sports activities for the newspapers he labored at, and he has photographed all the things from nursing midwives to hospice take care of the indigent.  He even traveled to Ethiopia to movie and {photograph} the expedition of a paleoanthropologist looking for the origins of man.

Omori’s work each in editorial and promoting has been acknowledged with two regional Emmy Awards, an Addy Award by the American Advertising Association, a Golden Eye Award from the World Press Photo Foundation, and recognition from the Pictures of the Year competitors for multimedia in addition to pictures, which was sponsored by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) and the University of Missouri.

Additionally, Omori been an NPPA Region 4 Photographer of the Year and was named the photographer of the 12 months by the Ohio News Photographer’s Association in 1989 and 2003. His impartial brief movies have screened and gained awards on the Cleveland International Film Festival and most not too long ago on the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival.

Omori mentioned the NPPA and World Press are massive organizations.

“(The NPPA Pictures of the Year competition) is a big contest,” Omori mentioned. “That was the contest in the states. The World Press is the contest for international documentary photography.”

Omori can be inducted into the corridor of fame on Dec. 3 at Edwins, which is situated in Cleveland Heights.