What happened to The Buffalo News?
On this Independence Day, the first without a print edition of The Buffalo News since the 1970s, here's my answer
How is this Independence Day unlike any other?
On July 4, 2024, in Buffalo, NY, tens of thousands of people still subscribing to The Buffalo News print edition found a new freedom: from picking up and reading the July 4th edition, like always.
This historic day brought to you by Lee Enterprises, which bought The Buffalo News from Berkshire-Hathaway January 2020.
Lee notified print customers last week that The Buffalo News no longer prints and delivers the paper on Independence Day, and other holidays, to “allow our employees to enjoy the holiday with friends and families," the Buffalo News Guild noted.
As my own Independence Day observation, I’ve decided to share my answer to the question most asked since I left The Buffalo News in December: “What happened to The Buffalo News?”
What follows contains no secret information, or people-bashing. Just my best guess after trying to figure it out since the Cleveland printing bulletin.
Best as I can figure, Lee Enterprises essentially internally wrote off The Buffalo News years ago, and is content to let it fizzle out and sell it for scrap. People in Davenport, Iowa, have made the newspaper’s circulation collapse worse by repeatedly making decisions antithetical to the growth of the newspaper, or even slowing its decline, while steadily trimming the Buffalo expenses, especially people.
The Buffalo News website was close to working well when Lee Enterprises forced its content into a one-size-fits-all web format that made all content harder to spot via casual scrolling. The Lee website brought back complaints from paying customers who could not get what they were paying for. Which Lee never spent the money to fix.
None of this was decided in Buffalo. The Buffalo News’ journalists are working diligently to produce the best report possible under circumstances and budgets they did not create. Web traffic and digital subscriptions aren’t growing fast enough in Buffalo to win any pivotal investments from the Davenport mothership.
How much better could The Buffalo News crew do in the race for audience if they weren’t driving Lee Enterprises’ janky bald-tired Ford Fiesta? If Lee ever fixes its website, perhaps we’ll find out.
A much smaller issue brought home the feeling that Lee Enterprises was not interested in making The Buffalo News better.
The reason my restaurant reviews stopped appearing in Gusto, and online, was because Lee Enterprises cut it. Not the review, specifically. Iowa issued an edict to trim freelance spending budgets across its properties.
Unknown to most, the Buffalo News restaurant review has always been a freelance gig, attached to the food editor position, since Janice Okun began. I was paid $50 from the newsroom freelance account to write the review each week, on my own time.
Then, in September: No more reviews, I was told. Freelance cuts.
Since it was by far my most popular work, and often among the most-read articles of the week, I was puzzled why Lee Enterprises didn’t consider my reviews worth keeping.
Until I came around to: What if Lee Enterprises has written off The Buffalo News?
Lee Enterprises may be serious about the future of digital news, but not in Buffalo, NY. The re-acquisition cost of every subscriber the News has already convinced to quit suggests Lee has secretly surrendered on that front.
Plus, Lee degraded - that is, refused to spend money on - tech support and call support access, to the point where only the most determined Buffalo News subscribers hang on through a digital Tough Mudder run to get their story.
All of this is going according to plan. In publicly traded companies, shot-callers are supposed to serve their investors’ interests, not whatever interests communities might have that coincidentally contain a corporate asset.
Like The Buffalo News.
#30#
All of the above for me. The breaking point came when the paper started printing pieces from 45s enablers and excuse makers. This shall not pass.
I’m not sure if I have the chronological order correct but I recall first the sports department being decimated. But I continued to subscribe because I liked you, Jeff Miers and Adam Zyglis. Then in some order you left and Jeff left. Also the only comics I read were dropped. And the print size and type font became silly (obit photos are stretched vertically to an absurd shape). We still subscribe (now digitally) for Adam, the crossword and jumble. And the My View when my wife or a friend writes it. Such a sad state of affairs.