As a participant and observer of government and politics my whole adult life I have worked with, fought with, and enjoyed the company of folks who are collectively called journalists. They work for newspapers, television, and radio. There are fewer of them now and their role has been changing significantly.
At the beginning of my working life I was employed at the Erie County Legislature. There were issues with budgets, health care, public works projects, social services and many other things. The legislators who I worked for were constantly dealing with those issues while at the same time dealing with the media. “If we give this story to the Buffalo Evening News Doug Turner at the Courier Express will be ticked off.” And visa versa, pretty much every day. In retrospect we, legislators and staff, did not appreciate how meaningful that situation actually was because no matter whoever was chosen to receive the first dibs on a story, the story would get covered (and oftentimes, therefore, attacked by the other newspaper.)
The Courier Express passed out of existence forty-three years ago. The newly named Buffalo News (since it began to publish in the morning) had the field all to themselves and they had a heyday with it. The paper’s owners made a ton of money. The newsroom staff was 200+ strong.
Over time things began to change. The main culprit was the internet. Pieces of the business started to slip away. Classified ads previously ran many pages but are almost an afterthought now. Social media took away the need for detailed movie listings while car shopping and home buying moved on to websites managed by the sellers. Horror of horrors, many daily comics disappeared.
Jim Heaney, the editor and executive director of Investigative Post, last week had a report on the latest round of cutting at the Buffalo News. Heaney reported (https://www.investigativepost.org/2025/09/19/more-cuts-coming-at-the-buffalo-news/) that the News this fall will cut another five staff members from the newsroom, bringing it down to around 40. He noted that the news staff was about 85 when the present owners, Lee Enterprises, purchased the paper five years ago.
Heaney quoted Jon Harris, a reporter and president of the Buffalo Newspaper Guild: “We’re disappointed that we’ll have to say goodbye to four or five more newsroom colleagues later this fall, and we’re hopeful that we’ll have enough volunteers willing and ready to resign with contractual severance so we can avoid layoffs.”
Heaney also noted that the News will cease publishing New York Times stories beginning in January. The Times reports mostly covered national and international news as well long obits about many people who most Western New Yorkers had never heard of. Maybe Associated Press reports will be the alternative.
The News recently published a statement about their circulation. It indicated that as of June 1, 2025, paid daily newspaper distribution was down to 23,735; it used to be about 150,000. There are 67,430 digital subscriptions making it among the lowest in the country.
Lee Enterprises is hemorrhaging money and carries a large debt. It has previously fought off buyout attempts from Alden Global Capital, a firm that specializes in cannibalizing whatever it can extract from the newspapers it acquires.
The further reduction of Buffalo News operations hurts the Western New York community. Municipal and school boards, public authorities, community organizations, and businesses are subject to less scrutiny. Useful news about things happening in the area goes unreported. It helps explain why people are less engaged in public dialogue and why voter turnout is diminished.
To a certain degree, the same can be said about the impact of federal funding cuts to public broadcasting at stations like Buffalo Toronto Public Media (aka WBFO), the NPR station in Buffalo.
Taking a knee
Coincidently, all this is happening as national television organizations are taking a knee to snowflake politicians who cannot handle criticism. Threats to news organizations are threats to free speech.
I cannot believe that it would ever come to this, but I feel it important to quote Senator Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson on the subject as reported by Axios:
- Cruz on his podcast: FCC chair Brendan Carr’s warning to Disney, ABC’s parent, was “dangerous as hell … right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going: ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
- Carlson’s hope that the assassination of Charlie Kirk won’t be used as a pretext for hate-speech laws: “[I]f that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that.”
The woke right’s cancel culture is riding high at this time. Some of them who pledge allegiance to the Constitution seem to be forgetting the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
Bluesky @kenkruly
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