Jim Heaney

Jim Heaney is editor and executive director of Investigative Post. He was an investigative reporter with The Buffalo News from 1986 to 2011 and a reporter and editor with The Orlando Sentinel from 1980-86. His coverage over the years has focused on economic development, local and state government, politics, education, housing and transportation, and he was an early practitioner of computer-assisted reporting. Heaney has won more than 20 journalism awards and was a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Sep 17

2023

Monday Morning Read

Get WeeklyPost delivered to your inbox Sundays by subscribing here. Below is part of what you could have read yesterday. Did Terry Pegula really say Black players should go back to Africa if they don’t like things here? It depends who you ask. Related: I spotted a Tweet the other day that pictured a half-dozen Bills players taking a knee prior to a game a few seasons back. None of the players remain on the team. Hmmmmm. OK, the efforts by a former girlfriend to embarrass Mark Poloncarz look suspect. But it’s not a good look for the county attorney to discourage[...]

Posted 1 week ago

Sep 10

2023

Monday Morning Read

Subscribe to WeeklyPost and get a leg up on Jim Heaney’s take on what’s in the news. For whatever reason, political reporters at The Buffalo News keep treating Chris Grant of Big Dog Strategies with a lot more respect than he deserves. I mean, Grant and his company employ the type of election tactics that give politics a bad name, often works for toxic candidates, including George Santos, and often spins without regard for the facts. Grant should be treated as a pariah, not a sage. Yet The News based a story Sunday in large part on his analysis that[...]

Posted 2 weeks ago

Sep 3

2023

Monday Morning Read

You could have read this yesterday if you subscribed – for free – to WeeklyPost. Sign up here. Buffalo Business First last week published a list of 60 companies that have received funding over the past eight years through the 43North program, which is intended to promote the growth of start-up businesses in Western New York. (Data could not be located on four others.) The list was accompanied by an in-depth story. I’ve done a lot of reporting in the past on economic development, for both Investigative Post and The Buffalo News, and took a deeper dive into the data. (It was fun to[...]

Posted 3 weeks ago

Aug 27

2023

Monday Morning Read

Subscribe to WeeklyPost and you’ll get Jim Heaney’s recommended reading – below – in your inbox Sunday mornings. Our day will come, The New York Times says. That is, climate change is going to make Buffalo a destination for people fleeing the ravages of a warming and otherwise chaotic planet. “Detroit, Cincinnati and Buffalo … are in regions with more climate-friendly geography,” The Times noted. We have access to water, affordable housing and the infrastructure to handle a larger population. If only we could get out of our own way. City of Good Neighbors? Not according to Buffalo News columnist Rod[...]

Posted 4 weeks ago

Aug 21

2023

New York lax on wage theft collections

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Documented reports on  special interests in politics. Saprina James was hopeful when she received a letter in 2019 about her wage theft claim against her former employer. The letter said the New York State Department of Labor had substantiated her claim and ordered Mugisha F. Sahini and his company, Riverside Line, to pay her more than $70,000 in back wages. “I was feeling good that the government was on my side, and that I would soon get[...]

Posted 1 month ago

Aug 13

2023

Monday Morning Read

You could have read this yesterday if you subscribed to WeeklyPost. Sign up here, it’s free. Most police departments in New York State are not reporting crime data to the FBI, according to the Marshall Project. Only “41 out of 583 law enforcement agencies in New York successfully submitted data to the FBI through the National Incident-Based Reporting System in 2022. The agencies that reported any crime stats represent roughly 1 in 5 people in the state,” the Marshall Project reported. “Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia had higher reporting rates than New York.” I checked out the site’s searchable[...]

Posted 1 month ago

Jul 30

2023

Monday Morning Read

Subscribe to WeeklyPost and you’ll receive Jim Heaney’s recommended reading (below) and a summary of Investigative Post’s reporting of the previous week in your inbox Sunday mornings. It’s free. Such a deal. The USA Today network took a look at government’s response to the Christmas Blizzard and found plenty of blame to go around. “Put simply, emergency management breakdowns cost lives,” the story concluded. A state senator wants his local district attorney to investigate a company who he says lied in an effort to secure IDA subsidies. And no, we’re not talking about the recent shenanigans in Lockport, although maybe we should. Relatively[...]

Posted 2 months ago

Jul 25

2023

Cashing in on the post-pandemic learning crisis

This story is republished from ProPublica, a nonprofit, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Investigative Post republishes its work from time to time. For the nation’s schoolchildren, the data on pandemic learning loss is relentlessly bleak, with education researchers and economists warning that, unless dramatic action is taken, students will suffer a lifelong drop in income as a result of lagging achievement. “This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” noted Eric Hanushek, the Stanford economist who did the income study, in ProPublica’s recent examination of the struggle to make up for what students missed out on during[...]

Posted 2 months ago