14 March 2004
Bruce JacksonThe shrinking Buffalo News
They say size doesn’t matter, that it's what you do with what you've got that matters.For a year now the Buffalo News has been bombarding its readers with "news" about its new presses: we've selected them, we bought them, they're in transit, we're unpacking them, we're installing them, we're turning them on. The News has run countless full-page ads showing the hardware in various stages of installation, such as "We're reaching new heights to create a new newspaper for Buffalo" (click on that link and then on the arrows to see more of the ads). It has run articles reporting on what seems like every step of the installation process, plus regular Sunday notes from News editor Margaret Sullivan telling us how wonderful journalism will be in Buffalo once the new presses are up and running.
If you go to their website now you’ll be hit with a popup of three lolly-tongued tail-wagging Dalmatian puppies and text that reads, "Our makeover is underway." Click on it and you get to a page with information about the $40 million project—and about contests and content options that have nothing at all to do with what printing machine is used to put ink on the pages.
"First sections off new press," an article by Douglas Turner published March 7, featured a photo of News publisher Stanford Lipsey posing with President Bush while Bush did something to a laptop that got the presses up and running. Turner said there was a great deal of precedent for two men of their position and busy schedules spending time on such foolishness,
given that Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower had done almost the same thing for prior Buffalo News press models: Eisenhower, in a lower-tech age, used a telegraph key; T.R., in a lower lower-tech age came to Buffalo and did it by hand. (Turner didn’t note, but might have, that when T.R.and DDE started their respective presses, the paper was the Buffalo Evening News, because that was before Omaha billionaire Warren Buffett bought the News and drove the city’s morning paper, the Courier-Express into the ground).
Turner also reported that after the ceremony President Bush showed Lipsey, his family, and Reps. Thomas M. Reynolds and Jack Quinn T.R.’s Congressional Medal of Honor and Nobel Peace Prize, and after that showed everybody some of the artifacts in the Oval Office.
That must have been nice, especially when President Bush was looking at T.R.’s Congressional Medal of Honor and the Nobel Peace Prize. I bet any reporter in the country would have given anything to have asked him at that moment, "So, Mr. President, what goes through your mind when you look at the highest award our country bestows upon military men and women who put themselves in harm’s way and when you look at the world’s most prestigious award for being an agent of world peace?" But there weren’t any reporters there, just a publisher, two congressmen, and some family, so they talked instead about artifacts in the Oval Office and they made jokes about how many pages the new presses could print an hour.
Turner's article, and all the other ads and articles, have said again and again that there would be lots more color inside the Buffalo News that came off these new presses. When I read those articles and tried to visualize what was coming all I thought of was a Buffalo version of USA-Today, the design of which the Buffalo News has been emulating more and more. Now they can go all the way.
What the ads and articles didn’t mention was that the Buffalo News was about to get little.
If you didn’t know that, you might have found the two most recent Sunday editions of the News as disorienting journalism. The outside news sections look normal. You turn the pages and read about the various disasters of the world. You turn more pages, hoping things will get better but knowing they won't. You read the articles and find out you were right: war, terrorism, pestilence, global warming, disease, hunger, politics. The usual.
Then you got to the inside travel and entertainment and opinion sections...and they are all shrunken. In a few weeks the entire newspaper will have been shrunken, so there won't be that visual jolt when you turn that last page of regular print and find yourself looking at the junior-sized version. I assume the owners figure we will soon come to think that the paper always looked like that.
So now we know what all the hype and glory was really about: praising the presses so we wouldn’t notice that the News was getting little. It's Orwellian Newspeak: We're giving you less so you're really getting more. If the Buffalo News gets only a little bit more little it can be a tabloid, like Artvoice or the Amherst Bee or the Spectrum.
What puzzled me about all those thousands of inches of newspaper space given to the technical capacities of the new printing machine and to Stanford Lipsey and George W. Bush posing and doing things on laptops was this: who other than the pressmen and the people paying for newsprint could possibly care about the new hardware? I assume it makes economic sense to Buffett because the smaller the newspaper it is, the less newsprint he has to buy. Warren Buffet takes a lot of money out of Buffalo every week from the Buffalo News and now, presumably, he will take more. Most of us don't own shares of Berkshire-Hathaway, so for us it’s the contents that matter. This is all like a baker going on and on about his fancy new ovens, and you're thinking, Tell me about the bread, Jack, not the ovens. Is your bread getting any better? If not, who cares about the fancy ovens you just bought? Smoke and mirrors notwithstanding, the consumer is concerned with matters of substance, not the manufacturing machine. It's that way with bread, with newspapers, with everything else.
Do those presses make the Buffalo News any better a paper? Do they deliver any more information? Do they deal with the single complaint heard more than any other from the paper's own senior reporters: that the reporting staff has been slashed and retirees are replaced with people of little experience and those economies really hurt the quality of reporting that goes on?
What, other than looking more like USA-Today, did they get and what did we get for more internal color pictures and a smaller page?
The new Buffalo News is nearly a column narrower than it used to be. (It is also several inches shorter, but the loss there is negligible because the new press works with smaller top and bottom margins than the old one.) The price you pay for the newspaper and the rates advertisers pay to reach you through it haven’t gone down. For an identical amount of space, in fact, real advertising rates will increase for both large and small advertisers. Advertising makes up about 60% or more of newspapers like the Buffalo News, so the stakes are large. In exchange for giving us a bit of interior color—bits of colored ribbon—Warren Buffett will take more money out of Buffalo.
None of the full-page ads describing the new machinery and none of the articles glorifying it said anything about expanding the newshole, the space reserved for news. So, unless there is a decision to add more pages, there will be less space for news in the new Buffalo News than a week or a month ago.
Their ads brag about "reaching new heights to create a new newspaper for Buffalo," but the height they have in mind is the the roof of their printing plant, not anything happening to the quality of the paper itself. And profits. Profits may also reach a new height. The $40 million pricetag on those new presses will be amortized very quickly.
As I noted earlier, they say size doesn’t matter. It’s what you do with what you’ve got. But what happens when you’ve suddenly got a lot less to do anything with? That matters.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.