22 November 2005
Bruce JacksonWhere did the Buffalo News go?
Stories you never read in the Buffalo NewsIn the next few months, the Buffalo News will announce that it is planning to kill its evening editions and terminate as many as 370 full-time employees, plus the jobs of all the kids who deliver those evening newspapers on their bikes and the older guys who deliver them from cars. People around the News know what's about to happen and they're miserable about it, but you knew nothing about it because the News's editors decided to permit nothing about that major unemployment story to appear in its pages.
The News is also about to shut down two of its three suburban bureaus—Northtowns and Southtowns. Only the Niagara Falls office will remain open. Those bureaus provide reporters and area residents quick and easy access to one another. When the bureau reporters are shifted to jobs at what they call "One Snooze Plaza," that access will be lost. That major change in coverage hasn't been noted in the newspaper's pages either.
Neither has the News permitted coverage of its own long-term labor dispute: the Buffalo News's Guild members have been working without a contract since last July 31. The News wants Guild members to give up significant portions of their health benefits. Guild members are resisting, saying they've sat still for 2 percent pay raises for years in exchange for the promise of exactly those health benefits the publisher now wants to peel away. (You can get the latest on this at the Guild website: http://buffalonewspaperguild.com).
The sixth paragraph of Stanford Lipsey's "Publisher's Corner" page in the Fall 2005 issue of The NewsNews, the Buffalo News's quarterly in-house publication "for employees and retirees," reads: "News employees take great pride in their giving and rightfully so. Now is the time we commit to taking care of those in great need. They are both the less fortunate in Western New York, and surprisingly, many employees at the Buffalo News." Why are Buffalo News employees among those in great need? Isn't working for a major newspaper supposed to be one of the better jobs in town? Maybe it's because so many News employees have struggled along on those parsimonious 2 percent annual wage increases while the cost of living has grown tall around them, during which time the newspaper's owner, Omaha billionaire Warren Buffett (whose Berkshire Hathaway A shares opened this morning for $88,000 each), like a loanshark coming to the door on schedule for his vig, has never for a moment backed off on the profits he has demanded and taken out of town.
"One of the Guild's job actions this fall," a reporter told me, "was for each member to send Lipsey a brightly colored Post-it note (pun intended) with a personal reaction/observation/anecdote regarding the draconian cuts in health care benefits. Those notes were placed along the atrium railing right outside his fifth-floor office so he couldn't miss them. But chief henchman Warren Colville [president of the Buffalo News] tore them down, without Lipsey ever getting the opportunity to read them. Such is the state of communication in the bunker that ostensibly symbolizes the First Amendent in Western New York."
Missing the biggest story in townThe News has yet to take a serious look at the effects of the proposed Seneca gambling joint on a city on the ropes like Buffalo, even though a downtown casino would have a far greater impact on the city's economy and quality of life than any corporate move in or out for the past decade. The News recently published a creampuff article about new jobs in Niagara Falls as a result of the casino there; it said nothing about costs elsewhere in the community occasioned by the casino, and nothing about local businesses seeing a steady decline in patronage as a direct result of the casino.
Casinos are a zero sum game: the money that goes into a casino is money not being spent somewhere else, and in Buffalo the bulk of the money will be spent by people from the region, people who will not be using that money to go to movies, theater, concerts, restaurants or for clothes, cars, books, CDs, and vacations. Casino jobs in a city like Buffalo inevitably displace higher-paying jobs.
This is a story about a major disaster-in-the-making, and the Buffalo News response thus far, other than occasional notes on real estate deals, has been an editorial and two or three Donn Esmonde columns saying it's a done deal, it's gonna come no matter what, so roll over and make the best of the fact that you're getting screwed.
This is easily as much a blunder by the News as was its handling of the proposed Peace Bridge twin span. For several years, the News took the position that the twin span was a bad idea, but it was a "done deal" so we should make the best of it. The Buffalo Niagara Partnership said the twin span was what was needed, so the Buffalo News said the twin span was what we should accept. So what if it dumped vastly increased quantities of noxious diesel exhaust into Buffalo's West Side, so what if it tore up local roads with no compensating business return, so what if it was ugly as sin? It was a "done deal" said the Buffalo News editorial page: live with it. But people in the city refused to take the News's advice to roll over, and as a result we're getting most of Front Park back, the idling trucks have been moved to Fort Erie, and we're getting a signature bridge.
Now they're doing the same thing with the Seneca casino: it's a done deal, roll over and take it, if you don't struggle it won't hurt too much.
But it's not a done deal. It's not over until it's over, and in the interim a newspaper that cared about its city would have every investigative reporter on its staff looking into every aspect of this plan to take land off the city's tax rolls forever and suck the life out of downtown Buffalo's struggling theaters and restaurants.
Why has this pending disaster never received the attention and space the News gave the assassin James Kopp or the corporate crook and Adelphia chief John J. Rigas, or the bank-owner Robert Wilmers, who was recently given a huge Page One strokejob with no news hook other than the strokejob itself? Why has the News used its editorial column to tell UB President John B. Simpson that it's his job to save the city by reforming the hospital system and moving the Law School and the School of Architecture and Planning into unused space downtown, but has not used that space to demand accountability from the public officials and private developers who have done everything possible to keep the public from having any voice in the casino affair whatsoever?
Questions that don't get answeredWhy, in other words, doesn't Buffalo have a newspaper that takes our town as seriously as, say, the Niagara Falls Reporter, a free weekly with minuscule resources, takes Niagara Falls, New York? The New York Times recently ran a major story on political corruption in Niagara Falls, all of it based on stories that first ran in the Niagara Falls Reporter. When was the last time the New York Times ran a major story based on stories that first ran in the Buffalo News? When was the last time anybody ran a major story based on stories that first ran in the Buffalo News?
How did the Buffalo News get so little? Where are the pages that used to be there? What happened to the reporters who used to write all those good stories? Why are all its columnists (save Rod Watson) so lame and banal? Why did it stop subscribing to Reuters, a major wire service for world news and photographs? Why is it so often merely a stenographer for Andy Rudnick and the Buffalo Niagara Partnership? Why are its arts pages operated like a private turf where organizations and artists that haven't kissed the arts editor's ass sufficiently do not exist? Why do the city editors no longer kick back badly-written stories? Why does the newspaper's website never correct errors?
The websiteThat one we can answer.
The Buffalo News website isn't run by the reporters or even the editorial staff. It's handled on contract with an East Aurora company. Every morning the stories are electronically shipped there, and the web company puts them online. That's because News publisher Stanford Lipsey doesn't want the Guild members to have any job jurisdiction there by establishing precedent. The result is what is arguably the worst newspaper site of any major newspaper on the web.Nothing there takes advantage of the web's ability to expand the print experience. No one running the News website seems to understand the difference between print (text) and the web (hypertext). They're just filling in the blanks. Unlike other newspapers' websites, the website of the Buffalo News never has longer versions of stories, reporters' blogs or readers' message boards, and neither does it correct errors in the first print edition or update developing stories during the day. Many stories particular to the zones for which the paper has targeted editions—Southtowns, Northtowns, Niagara—don't make it to the website at all.
With very few exceptions, the Buffalo News being one of them, all the major newspapers' sites are 24-hour: if an important story breaks, it goes up immediately. If a major story breaks and the New York Times hasn't gotten its reporters on it yet, the Times's web site posts the AP or Reuters story until the Times version is ready, at which point the Times story is substituted. Not only does the Buffalo News never post breaking stories, but its own site doesn't go up until 9 a.m., by which time much of the news in it is already stale.
"Because of that structure," a reporter noted, "there's no way to update the site. If there's a mistake in a story, it can't be fixed, the story can only be killed from the website. It's actually less flexible than the physical newspaper itself that way, where stories can be adjusted between editions. So what comes out of all of this is a website that doesn't serve the readers all that well, doesn't add anything more than the paper itself offers, doesn't offer the paper's employees a chance to expand in that direction and in all likelihood doesn't make a profit. All because of the publisher's antipathy toward the Net."
It isn't likely that he is going to get any more in touch with where the world is moving: lately, Lipsey has been spending more and more time at his posh digs on Camelot Court in a gated community on the grounds of the Morningside County Club in Rancho Mirage, California. The place is adjacent to two more country clubs—Tamarisk and Springs—and isn't far from Frank Sinatra Drive. That's miles and miles and miles and miles from the Net, from the world of now, and from Buffalo.
The edition that isn'tAll major city newspapers have several editions each day and, sometimes, editions targeted for specific regions. The Buffalo News is one of the few newspapers with a bogus edition: the Niagara edition is delivered in the afternoon, giving Niagara County readers the impression they're getting home delivery of an afternoon paper, with up-to-the-minute news. What they are in fact getting is a paper printed immediately after the Sunrise Edition (the paper that's sold first thing in the morning at stores and in honor boxes throughout Western New York but is not home-delivered), so it's really an edition with a production deadline around midnight that sits in bundles at pickup points for half a day before being home-delivered in the afternoon but contains none of the same-day news updates (meager as they are) that are received by home-delivery customers of the three zoned suburban editions in Erie County as well as the final, for the city. They give Niagara readers the impression they're being pampered, but it's a scam. They do get zoned local news, but absolutely nothing that occurs beyond the Sunrise deadline—in other words, nothing from beyond the day before.
Profits, stenography, cronyismMost American newspapers have suffered large circulation losses over the past decade, and many are therefore cutting staff, but hardly any have had the circulation losses as large as the Buffalo News. The paper's publisher and editors blame changes in reading habits (younger people are more likely to get their news from the web), and outmigration (in 50 years Buffalo's population has dropped by half). But that's not enough to explain the shrinking readership. Buffalo's population has indeed dropped, but many of those people moved to the suburbs—to Cheektowaga, Clarence, East Amherst, West Seneca and the other towns a short drive from downtown Buffalo. The News's readership has always extended far beyond the cityline: it is read in 10 counties, two of them in Pennsylvania, and in southern Ontario.
There was a huge amount of hoopla about the new color printing presses two years ago—the News ran full-page promos for itself every day for a while and pasted images of its color-spotted cartoon Dalmatian mascots everywhere—but other than giving them the capacity to print color photos inside and save a few bucks on paper by going smaller, and an opportunity to raise advertising rates, they haven't changed much. The reduced size came at the cost of a reduced news hole (the space allotted to news) and hugely reduced national and foreign coverage. It also cost the jobs of 13 journeymen and 18 apprentice press operators. The eye-candy hasn't been enough to bring strayed readers back to the fold: circulation is still plunging.
One staffer said, "I actually thought that Buffett, as a big stockholder in the Washington Post, a friend/adviser/confidant of Katharine Graham's and someone who clinked glasses regularly with the media elite, would seize the opportunity to turn the News into one of the best regional newspapers in America so he could have some journalistic bona fides—bragging rights, if you will, albeit on a smaller but nonetheless respectable scale—when hobnobbing with the Grahams and Bradlees of this world. How naive I was to entertain such a thought. Once he put a stake through the heart of the Courier, it was—and continues to be—about one thing and one thing only in Buffalo: profit maximization. And you see the results."
Another said, "The two most crippling problems are cronyism and stenography. From those, most of the other problems flow. For instance, credibility." The staffer remarked on the News's coverage of Joel Giambra which, until very recently, was perfectly uncritical. One reason Erie County got in such a mess, the staffer said, was there wasn't a newspaper in town willing to snap at Giambra's heels when he needed it. "Stenography comes at a price," the staffer said, "as does superficiality. And that price is heavy. The News loves the image of being a watchdog. But is it? Telling us that the roof has collapsed, AFTER it has collapsed, doesn't do a hell of a lot of good, does it? Uh, yeah, well, thanks, but we've noticed. ..."
Is Buffett getting ready to move on?Usually, as long contract negotiations go on, the two sides soften parts of their positions as part of the process of coming to agreement. But the News management is now offering even less than it was several months ago. Some Guild members are worried about being protected in case of a sale. "Since Buffett no longer has any amortization advantages at the News," one reporter said, "he might be interested in pulling a swap, with Berkshire Hathaway getting the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle plus WGRZ/Channel 2 and Gannett getting the News. Such a swap might be considered far-fetched by some, but considering what happened in Detroit,* euphemistically described as 'an exchange of assets,' it's well within the realm of possibility. Tax advantages for all concerned, no doubt. Given the ages of the recently snappish Lipsey (who turned 78 in October, and whose longtime executive secretary was recently found a place elsewhere in the building) and Buffett (75), News circulation in free fall and the contract in limbo, there's a renewed undercurrent that this could be as good a time as any for Berkshire Hathaway and Gannett to cash in here and, for all intents and purposes, break the union (rather than settle for merely eroding it) once and for all. From a journalistic standpoint, it would be a nightmare. Gannett's cookie-cutter papers are sweatshops, with quality only an accidental byproduct. The chain burnishes its image with USA Today but can't boast of much else."
Bob Powell's prophecyCould the Buffalo News become the kind of newspaper so many of its reporters think it ought to be? Could it be a newspaper that tried to cover major stories in time to matter, a paper in which cronyism and stenography were trumped by journalism?
For starters, it would require Warren Buffett to give up a piece of his still very substantial Buffalo profits. It would take management that took these issues as seriously as the polychrome spots on their cartoon Dalmatian mascots. It would take news and arts editors who renounced stenography, cronyism, favoritism and personal bias the way a born-again renounces sin.
What do you think are the chances of any of that coming to pass? Right you are.Bob Powell was a sports reporter at the Courier-Express who was hired by the News as a copy editor when the Courier died. A friend of his said Powell, "one of the jolliest, most competent people I've ever met in the newspaper business, who, a few years ago, died in his sleep, [said] in the early '90s, referring to News management: 'You know, these people could even fuck up a monopoly. Just wait. ...' You might say the man was prophetic."
Which brings us to the bottom line of your Buffalo News: where's its soul?
*What happened in Detroit was this:
—Knight Ridder sold the Detroit Free Press to Gannett.
—Gannett, which owns the Detroit News, sold that paper to the MediaNews Group, headed by Dean Singleton.
—Knight Ridder acquired three papers from Gannett: the Idaho Statesman in Boise, the Olympian in Olympia, Wash., and the Bellingham (Wash.) Herald.
—In return, Gannett is getting the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat and an undisclosed amount of cash.
Some other Buffalo Report articles on journalistic practice at the Buffalo News:
Buffalo News to Buffalo: Screw you, one more time 13 September 2005
Buffalo News downsizing continues 2 August 2004
Donn Esmonde, city planner (not) (not) 8 June 2004
The Shrinking Buffalo News 14 March 2004
The Buffalo News "I-did-not-have-sex-with-that-Business-Council" interoffice memo 16 November 2002
Editorial moonlight at One News Plaza 15 October 2002
Dull Sabres 24 December 2002
How the murderer James C. Kopp took control of the Buffalo News 2 December 2002
Nailing the Lackawanna Six: Political innuendo and poison in the jury pool 30 September 2002
Buffalo Newswatch: Color-coded justice. How do we skew the news? Let me count the ways... 15 September 2002
Buffalo NewsWatch: The war against James Pitts heats up 2 September 2002
Buffalo NewsWatch: Sins of omission 22 August 2002
Truth to order on Page 1 1 August 2002
Why did Jeff Simon stick it to Leslie Fiedler? 19 July 2002
The Rigas family and the Buffalo News: giving hagiography a bad name 30 June 2002
Time to end the Rigas pity-party. 11 June 2002
So where are they going to store Tom Toles' chair? 4 June 2002
Copyright 2005 by Buffalo Report, Inc.