2 August 2004
Bruce Jackson
Buffalo News downsizing continues.
The Buffalo News continues to shrink in size, circulation, and substance.
Over the past year it has published dozens of full-page ads and scores of smaller notices about the wonders that would follow on the installation of its two new six-story, 340-ton, $40 million presses. The presses are up and running, and there have been three significant changes as a result: more color on the inside, a notably diminished newspaper, and 31 pressmen laid off without severance pay or any other compensation.
The News has attempted to cope with its reduced size with new design. New fonts are supposed to make the paper more readable. Thinner top and bottom margins keep columns close to their former length, but significantly reduced horizontal margins forced a cut from six to five columns. Page one articles that used to be continued inside at whatever length they needed now all jump to page two, where they are ruthlessly slashed to fit the limited space. It is the size of page two that determines the length of a page one story now, not the significance of the story.
The latest reduction is to the Poetry Page, which, according to the page’s editor, R.D. Pohl, "will be cut to a half page from the full page format it has enjoyed since its inception in 1977. In its new format, the Poetry Page will publish two or perhaps three poems a month rather than the six to eight poems we have been fortunate enough to fit on the page in the past." Pohl’s "Literary Notes" column, which he has written since 1987, will be eliminated entirely.*
At the same time, the News has doubled the size of the real estate transactions section. There is no more information in the entries in that section and no increase in the number of transactions listed. It’s just a matter of using larger type and more space between lines. Since these are just mechanical, clerical entries, requiring the work of neither reporters nor content editors, inflating the space those entries occupies gives the appearance of more substance where none exists. The change is all air.
Another key loss happened when Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Tom Toles was hired by the Washington Post two years ago. Any one of several highly-regarded editorial cartoonists might have been hired to take Toles’s chair, but the News instead opted for a staff artist who couldn’t draw, who had no sense of humor, and whose politics were at best banal. He was recently replaced by a college student summer intern who is a slightly better draftsman but who knows little or nothing of politics. Political cartoonists should be able to draw well and should know something about politics; that's the job. But a college intern is paid $355 a week, while minimum for a cartoonist is $1,187 a week. You get what you pay for and if you don’t want much, which seems to be the case at the News, you can get off cheap. The only price for that trade is the quality of product delivered to the readers. If you don't care about the quality of the product then the choice is simple: do it on the cheap.
The most visible change, other than the smaller size, is the great increase in color pictures. There is now an entire page of photographs every day. Some of these images are newsworthy, most of them are just eye candy. "The pictures now look as good as USA Today's did 20 years ago," said one long-time News reporter who is frustrated with the whole change. "But the news hole is smaller and the writing is just as formulaic. Part of the problem is that in trying to make the paper more ‘reader-friendly,’ they've done things like make all jumps go to page two. Then the line editors have to whack them down to make them fit. The ads on page three of the local section have made that page into one of little more than briefs, and stories that used to go on page three now go on page six, behind the obituaries and where nobody will see them. They'll also go under the weather (which means under the fold) on the back page of the section."
The two primary costs of publishing a newspaper are personnel and newsprint. They fired the 31 pressmen, replaced Tom Toles with a college student, and made the page-size smaller. The paper is significantly cheaper to produce now, and it shows.
The Buffalo News is the only large newspaper in Erie county. The first thing Warren Buffett did when he bought the News in 1977 was drive the Buffalo Courier-Express into the ground. Now he’s got a monopoly in Buffalo. No publicly owned newspaper in America operates with a higher profit margin than the Buffalo News. If someone wants to advertise in a newspaper in Buffalo, the News is the only show in town. Even though circulation is down dramatically, ad rates have gone up, so many smaller businesses cannot now afford to advertise in the News at all: fewer and fewer businesses are connecting with fewer and fewer readers. Circulation fell 21% in the 15 years from 1983 to 1998 (320,372 to 252,705); then it fell 19% more in the next 5 years, down to 201,900. Erie County’s population fell only 3.3% from 1983 to 1998, and far less than that from 1998-2003.
The News’s loss of circulation cannot be blamed on demographics or technology. If circulation is off 37% in the past 20 years it is because the Buffalo News lost readers and has been incapable of capturing new ones.
The market isn’t infinitely elastic: business owners can be squeezed only so much and content can only be cut so far. They can’t keep raising prices on the paper and the ads and not replacing departing staff members in order to maintain the huge profits they send to Warren Buffett in Omaha City. At some point that reduced circulation will no longer justify the price. The vastly depleted staff will have to be depleted even more, but out of necessity rather than choice. The paper’s services reduced even further, whereupon fewer people will buy the paper and fewer advertisers will advertise in it. It’s a downward spiral, unchecked by long-term vision and propelled by lust for short-term profits. Unless they reverse direction entirely by once again investing in the human capital required to be a newspaper worth taking seriously, Warren Buffet’s Buffalo News will do to itself what Warren Buffett’s Buffalo News did to the Courier-Express: annihilate a newspaper by slow, calculated asphyxiation.
*The night after this article was posted on Buffalo Report, poetry page editor R.D. Pohl informed us that because of public pressure the News had decided not to bisect the poetry page after all. The other changes described here, however, stand.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.