Categories for Monday Morning Read

Jan 13

2025

What is The Buffalo News thinking?

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The vacant Buffalo News building, sold to developer Douglas Jemal. Lee Enterprises bought The Buffalo News nearly five years ago and has vandalized it since. That was never more evident than last week. Let’s start with the extensive use of New York Times obituaries. It’s a pet peeve of mine.  A week ago Sunday, the paper’s local section included no fewer than five such obits, totaling some two pages, almost as much space as as what was devoted to local news in the section.  As is usually the case, the deceased had no connection to Buffalo. In fact, most were[...]

Posted 4 months ago

Dec 29

2024

April Baskin’s results fall short of her rhetoric

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The Buffalo News sure is fond of April Baskin, the outgoing chair of the Erie County Legislature and incoming state senator. In a profile and subsequent editorial, The News portrayed her as an effective champion of social justice.  I beg to differ. The Legislature under her leadership has been a rubber stamp for County Executive Mark Poloncarz. She seems joined at the hip with Democratic Party HQ, which saw to it that she ascended to Tim Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat without serious opposition.   Baskin and her colleagues somehow decided construction of the new Bills stadium didn’t require an environmental impact[...]

Posted 4 months ago

Dec 23

2024

The smart way to build a stadium

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I get a chuckle out of stories that raise the prospect of major spinoff development near the new Buffalo Bills stadium. The Buffalo News published another story to that effect last week. It’s not gonna happen.  Terry Pegula has insisted on an open-air stadium surrounded by parking lots, located in the outer-ring suburb of Orchard Park. His approach runs counter to best practices employed by most other NFL owners who have built stadiums over the past decade. The Conversation, which fancies itself for “academic rigor, journalistic flair,” outlined how stadiums can be done right. Key points include: “It’s smarter to[...]

Posted 4 months ago

Dec 8

2024

Our neighbors to the north are not a problem

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Donald Trump has lumped Canada in with Mexico as a source of drugs and undocumented immigration and threatened to impose tariffs as a consequence.  Jerry Zremski of The Buffalo News debunks the claim. Twenty-four times more drugs have been seized at the southern border than the northern one. Undocumented immigrants: 11 times greater crossing from Mexico than Canada so far this year. Buffalo police want to use artificial intelligence as a crime fighting tool. The ACLU cautions of the potential for abuse when police are given AI tools without proper guardrails. Niagara Falls is starting to smarten up when it[...]

Posted 5 months ago

Dec 1

2024

Let’s get real about why Harris lost to Trump

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A fair number of press observers criticized mainstream news outlets for not reporting on Donald Trump more critically during the campaign for president. Yeah, the press could have done a better job, at least when it came to its obsession about polls. But I think the criticism was overblown. I mean, did anyone reading the newspaper or watching television news not know what Trump was about? I’ll note that polling showed that voters who relied on mainstream outlets favored Trump’s opponent by a wide margin. I will take issue with one important aspect of press coverage since the election, however.[...]

Posted 5 months ago

Nov 24

2024

No wonder so many people are misinformed

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I don’t mean to be a press critic, but compelling stories keep coming to my attention that I want to share. One in five adults regularly get their news from social media influencers, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Among the under-30 set, it’s more than one in three. These influencers are most frequently found on Twitter and are mostly men who are more likely to lean right than left. Perhaps most telling, only a quarter of influencers have ever worked for a news organization.   Opined Taylor Lorentz of UserMag:  “Pew’s findings paint a concerning picture of[...]

Posted 5 months ago

Nov 17

2024

Way too many people can’t read – adults and kids

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The numbers are shocking. “Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 130 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children,” reports the National Literacy Institute. That’s half the adult population.  That same half has difficulty performing such basic tasks such as reading the labels of their prescription drugs. A little more than half of adults read below a sixth grade reading level. One in five are flat out illiterate. A majority of Americans don’t read a single book through the course of a year. Only one-in-three kids read for pleasure. Etc.[...]

Posted 6 months ago

Nov 3

2024

Buffalo’s growing remote workforce

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Downtown Buffalo has been hit hard since the pandemic, with a loss of an estimated 20,000 workers. That helps to explain the rise in remote work in our region, as reported last week by Coworking Cafe. The share of people in Buffalo working from home has grown from 4.1% in 2019 to 10.7% in 2023. Our share of the remote workforce is a little below the national average of 13.8 percent. That number in neighboring Rochester is 8.8 percent. Partly as a result of fewer people commuting to work, traffic volume and congestion is down. In Buffalo, the declines were[...]

Posted 6 months ago
Investigative Post