Jan 13
2026
Change coming to Buffalo News ownership
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by Jim Heaney, editor of Investigative Post
It can’t get any worse.
That’s my first-blush impression of the pending change in ownership and management of Lee Enterprises, the newspaper chain whose holdings include The Buffalo News.
Lee bought The News, and 30 other daily papers owned by Berkshire Hathaway, in March 2020. Lee’s ownership of The News — and, I suspect, many other papers under its control — has been marred by top-down management and poor decision-making.
Crippling debt, along with the changing economics of the newspaper industry, are at the root of Lee’s problems and help explain its management of The News.
Revenues companywide have dropped over the past five years from $795 million to $562 million. At the same time, Lee has struggled at times to make payments on $576 million in debt accumulated to finance several expansions. This double-bind has forced Lee into a constant cut-cutting mode.
Of late, Lee has seen its profits vanish — it lost $35.7 million last year — and its stock price tank, falling from a high of $43.21 three years ago to $4.94 at the close of the stock market Monday.
I worked at the News for 25 years during the Warren Buffett era and have kept in touch with a number of people still there since departing in 2011. The strong consensus of those left behind: Lee’s corporate managers are inept.
“Most of us in the newsroom would give Lee, at best, a D,” said Jon Harris, a News reporter and president of the Buffalo Newspaper Guild, which represents newsroom employees.
Lee has followed the playbook established by hedge fund managers who have gobbled up and strip-mined daily newspapers the past 15 years. Lee has slashed the Buffalo News newsroom from about 95 to 48 jobs, sold off the News building at Washington and Scott streets, terminated employee pension plans, and shifted printing operations to Cleveland.
The moves have saved Lee money and perhaps kept The News operating in the black. But they’ve come at a steep price.
Print circulation has dwindled to an average of 23,792, according to the annual publisher’s statement filed in June with the United States Postal Service. Digital subscriptions were 67,430. Less news coverage and a lousy website has a lot to do with it. So do aggressive price increases. Ditto for poor customer service.
As a result, the paper’s standing in the community has suffered.
The paper’s remaining staff does a respectable job for the most part and still includes some good reporters. But The News is a shell of its former self, and it doesn’t help that it expends so much of its limited resources and newshole on coverage of the Bills and Sabres.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomLee’s majority owner-in-waiting — the deal is expected to close in the next few months — is David Hoffmann, 73, who has a net worth of $2 billion. His holdings include businesses in 30 countries and 400 locations worldwide. The Hoffmann Family of Companies employs 17,000 in the fields of agriculture, aviation and transportation, financial and professional services, hospitality and entertainment, manufacturing, marine, media and marketing, and real estate.
Of note: Hoffman struck a deal last month to buy majority interest in the Pittsburgh Penguins of the National Hockey League.
Of particular note: The Hoffmann Media Group owns 21 small newspapers.
Hoffmann has pursued controlling interest in Lee for more than a year. He was initially rebuffed, but Lee executives warmed to him as the company’s financial plight worsened.
“Lee’s back was up against the wall. And I think it was looking for a way to stabilize the business,” Tim Franklin, a professor and chair of local news at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, told the Associated Press.
Here’s the deal in a nutshell: For a $35 million investment, Hoffmann’s stake in the company will grow from 10 to 52 percent. Another $15 million from other investors garnered a commitment from Berkshire Hathaway to reduce the interest payments due on $446 million of remaining debt from 9 to 5 percent, which will save an estimated $18 million a year. The debt stems from Berkshire Hathaway holding the note on Lee’s purchase of its 31 daily newspapers, 49 weeklies and 32 specialty publications in 2020 and loaning it additional funds to cover previous debts that were coming due.
Hoffmann is expected to assume chairmanship of Lee once the deal goes through. Kevin Mowbray, the company’s president and CEO, has already retired and Chief Financial Officer Tim Millage is departing the end of February. More house cleaning is expected once Hoffmann formally takes over.
Hoffmann isn’t saying much publicly, and when he has spoken, it’s mostly been to publications in his native Missouri, where his business activities haven’t always panned out. (He now lives in Naples, Florida.)
Last April he told the St. Louis Business Journal that Lee’s largest newspapers are the “least attractive” part of Lee’s portfolio. That would presumably include The News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Omaha World-Herald. Large papers, Hoffmann said, are “more complex, and there are more things to deal with than are in these little local markets.”
St. Louis magazine, in a piece published last week, had this to say about Hoffman’s track record as a publisher.
Hoffmann, it said:
- Prefers local control. That would be good for The News, which operated independently when Buffett owned the paper.
- Claims to have never downsized the staffs of the newspapers he’s bought. That sets him apart from just about every major newspaper operator in the United States, save The New York Times.
- While professing a soft spot for print, believes digital is the future, including paywalls. That’s the prevailing wisdom in the newspaper industry.
- Is big on high school sports. This is a relative strong suit of The News.
The New York Times, in an October 2024 profile, quoted J. Pason Gaddis, the media group’s chief executive, as saying the gameplan for Lee would involve reinvesting in journalism to build a more substantial digital subscription business.
“You put journalists back into City Council meetings, you put journalists back out at sports games for the local communities,” Gaddis told The Times. “You have local management again in these newspapers, which has all been stripped out.”
This all sounds good, but keep in mind Hoffmann is a relative newcomer to the newspaper business and his holdings are small publications. It’s one thing to turn a profit at, say the Macinaw Island Town Crier or The Telluride Times, and another to successfully manage the likes of The Buffalo News or St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Harris, of the Buffalo Newspaper Guild, is taking a wait-and-see approach.
“We’re not sure what it means quite yet, though we’re optimistic about the infusion of money and the lowering of the interest rate from Berkshire. I just hope he chooses a good CEO to lead Lee.”
Hoffman’s wealth can make a difference, but billionaires have a mixed track record as newspaper publishers. The Washington Post has taken a wrong turn of late under Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s stewardship of the Los Angeles Times has been problematic.
There have been some successes — the Minnesota Star-Tribune and Boston Globe comes to mind. The Poynter Institute, in a December 2024 piece said a “common denominator” of successful billionaire publishers is “hiring the best available talent for publisher and editor, then letting those professionals do their jobs with only the lightest of oversight.”
