Sep 27
2024
More newsroom cuts at The Buffalo News
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by Jim Heaney, editor of Investigative Post
Lee Enterprises is taking another bite out of the newsroom of The Buffalo News.
A big bite.
Sources tell me Lee has mandated that 10 jobs be cut from a newsroom that has an estimated 55 positions. Five of the cuts will come via either buyouts or layoffs. In addition, five vacant positions will be eliminated altogether.
We’re talking downsizing approaching 20 percent, in one fell swoop. And it’s not just a loss of bodies, which translates into less coverage of our communities, but the loss of institutional knowledge when veterans walk out the door.
Keep in mind that peak newsroom employment in the 1980s topped 200. It stood at about 85 when Lee bought the paper from Berkshire Hathaway in March 2020. There’s been a steady chipping away since then.
The abandoned Buffalo News building on Washington Street.
It’s happening throughout the newspaper industry. As The Washington Post reported in July: “Newspapers lost 77 percent of their jobs over the past 20 years, the single steepest dive among any of the 532 industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
It’s likely Lee is cutting jobs at many of the other 76 daily newspapers it owns, reflecting the company’s weakening finances and stock price.
On Wednesday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch laid off six newsroom employees.
In a move described as “a blow to journalism in Montana,” Lee earlier this month laid off the former managing editor and enterprise editor of the Missoulian.
And the Richmond Times-Dispatch just announced the termination of two award-winning sports writers.
“The Lee Enterprises-owned papers have been shedding staff for years now, but when it gets to the level of guys like Teel and Barber, you’re far past cutting fat and even muscle – this level of cut is to the bone,” according to the Augusta Free Press.
Lee is struggling, like most newspaper owners, with the demise of the business model that has sustained the industry for more than a century. The internet has stolen eyeballs and revenue and newspapers, with a few notable exceptions, have been slow to adapt. The exceptions include The New York Times, which has added to its newsroom staff and digital offerings, and the Minnesota Star Tribune, which has retained staff and invested in expanded coverage.
That’s not the case here in Buffalo. It’s not just the downsizing, and a corresponding plunge in circulation, but the decision a year ago to start printing the paper in Cleveland. That has necessitated earlier deadlines and resulted in much of the print edition consisting of day-old news.
I mean, if you want to read in print about a Bills game played on Sunday, you usually have to wait until Tuesday’s paper.
The paper’s obsession with sports coverage — particularly the Bills and Sabres — has come at the expense of local reporting, which historically has been the primary reason people buy the paper. Take yesterday’s print edition as an example: it included as many stories (10) on football and hockey as it did local news and business coverage. Local news accounted for about four pages, while the sports section was eight pages.
And the website? It’s not unusual for sports stories to populate most of the prime real estate on the homepage.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomI’m told the News staff is understandably disheartened by the latest round of cuts. Reporters and editors are fighting the good fight, but there’s no getting around the impact of reduced numbers.
The hope is that enough veteran employees will take a buyout, worth up to a year’s salary, to avoid layoffs. Given how miserable most of the staff is, I think that’s likely.
The latest staff cuts won’t be the last, however. That’s not how most newspaper chains operate. Their modus operandi is to buy papers, strip them of their assets, including real estate and pensions, and cut expenses to keep squeezing profits out of what remains of the business until it’s been bled dry.
That’s exactly what’s happening here. The News recently sold its longtime office building on Washington Street to developer Doug Jemal and strong-armed the union representing newsroom employees into terminating the pension plan in favor of an alternative yet to be determined.
The demise of The News is bad for its employees and the community. Every city needs a good daily newspaper. Even in their diminished state, newspapers do most of the heavy lifting in producing consequential reporting at the local level. The less reporting, the more skulduggery the politicians get away with, and given the cesspool that is Western New York politics, that’s especially troublesome.
