In the summer of 2019, with a certain amount of trepidation, I attended a summer party at the Buffalo News. It would be the first time I’d been back in the newspaper building since I stepped down as editor in 2012 to become the public editor of the New York Times. When I arrived, I found a festive scene. Cocktails and oysters were served on a balcony overlooking the Lake Erie harbor and the new construction at the city’s Canalside development, which housed shops, restaurants, and, in winter, a skating rink near the arena where the Buffalo Sabres played their NHL games. Buffalo, once the eighth largest city in the United States and the bustling eastern terminus of Great Lakes shipping until the St. Lawrence Seaway came along in 1959, had fallen on hard times when the steel and auto plants hit the skids in the 1980s. The Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna, the small city just south of Buffalo where I was born and raised, was once the largest steel factory in the nation, employing twenty thousand workers. It shut down in 1982, leaving a huge, largely abandoned industrial carcass on the Lake Erie waterfront.
But in recent years, Buffalo has bounced back economically and has become an unlikely darling of tourism roundups of coolest cities to visit. It landed on a list of “best places for millennials to settle,” and my son, a young public defender, was one of them. He lives in a rehabbed industrial building downtown, where the high ceilings and low rents are the envy of his coastal friends. Whether Buffalo’s resurgence has benefited the city’s large poor population was far less certain.
Inside the newspaper building, as I feared, the changes were breathtaking. Home to a thousand employees not so long ago, it now employed less than half of that. Chatting with my former colleagues on the executive committee and others in the know, I heard nothing encouraging. These conversations left me with the depressing sense that the paper, even if it endured, would be vastly changed over the next five years. Its staff likely would continue to shrink and it might eventually publish in print only on Sundays, if at all. It was tough to hear, but it resonated with everything I knew from covering the national media scene for the Washington Post.
Still, this was personal. This was where I had grown up, written thousands of stories, met and married another reporter when we were in our twenties, won writing awards, hired scores of journalists, and even hopped in an ambulance when a pregnant reporter went into labor. It was in this building’s first-floor auditorium that the newsroom’s journalists gave me a standing ovation when I was named the paper’s first female managing editor. That was one of the great thrills and honors of my life. In short, this was my world. And it was suffering. For several weeks in every recent summer, I’ve moved back to the Buffalo area and worked from a family cottage, always arranging immediately for home delivery of the paper. It would land on my front deck in its orange plastic bag by 6 a.m. most mornings. The idea hit me hard that perhaps next summer—or the following one—that would no longer be possible.
That notion was just about unimaginable for me. After all, I had spent an entire professional lifetime there. As I prepared to emerge from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism with my newly minted master’s degree in 1980, I was lucky enough to have summer internship offers at both of my hometown papers, the morning Buffalo Courier-Express and the Buffalo Evening News. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I put the question to my father, a Buffalo defense attorney. I remember his words: “The News is the dominant paper.” Dominant sounded good; I took the News internship. My mother, eager for me to stay local at the end of the summer tryout, used some equally memorable words as she pushed me to excel and to make my presence known to the powers-that-be. “Ingratiate yourself,” she said. I didn’t like the sound of that. I wanted to be known for my journalism, not for my winning personality. At any rate, and for whatever reason, when September came, I was offered a full-time reporting job on the business desk. I thought I would stick around Buffalo for a couple of years and move on—perhaps to the Boston Globe or the Chicago Tribune—but that never happened. I stayed, moving up the ranks and doing nearly every job in the newsroom. I got married, bought a house, had two children, and eventually, in 1999, became its first female top editor. It had taken me nineteen years to go from summer intern to executive editor, a job I would hold for nearly thirteen years before moving to New York City. And I appreciated the privilege every day as editor. As J. D. Salinger’s fictional Buddy Glass said about entering the classroom where he taught undergraduates, to me that newsroom was a patch of holy ground that I was fortunate to walk on every working day.
The paper, like many another regional dailies of that era, was stable and financially solid for most of that period. Before I had arrived, the News was bought by Warren Buffett and became part of his Berkshire Hathaway empire. But Buffett knew that the Buffalo market could support only one daily; cities all over the country were seeing the shuttering of the second or third paper in town.
So Buffett, through his appointed publisher Stanford Lipsey and then-editor Murray Light, set about making sure the winner in Buffalo would be the News. (Lipsey had sold his chain of weeklies, Sun Newspapers, to Buffett in the late 1960s, remaining as publisher; a few years later, he enlisted Buffett’s help in conceptualizing a story that eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for local investigative reporting on financial malfeasance at Omaha’s Boys Town charity.) In Buffalo, Lipsey’s and Light’s paper competed fiercely for further market domination, starting a Sunday edition to go head to head with the Courier. They won the newspaper war in Buffalo. In 1982, the Courier-Express published its last edition. The Buffalo News dropped “Evening” from its nameplate, began a morning edition, and became exactly what Buffett wanted it to be, from a business perspective: the only game in town. At its peak, Sunday circulation was about 350,000, and the paper boasted the highest market penetration of any regional paper in the United States.
The paper hired some of the best talent from the Courier, including political cartoonist Tom Toles, who would win the News its third Pulitzer Prize. (When Toles left to replace the legendary Herbert Block at the Washington Post, I had the sense to hire one of our interns, Adam Zyglis, a talented cartoonist and illustrator, fresh out of Buffalo’s Canisius College. I urged him to do the kind of work that would win a Pulitzer. He promised me that he would, and in 2015, he delivered on the promise.) The News even hired the Courier’s executive editor, Douglas Turner, and installed him as the paper’s Washington bureau chief. With bureaus all around the western end of the state and a strong presence in Albany and Washington, the News was a solid and well-respected newspaper.
And for years, it had what seemed like a license to print money. Like other monopoly newspapers, its profit margins were well above 30 percent. But it kept a relatively lean staff, something I tried to change when I became editor. I didn’t get very far in terms of increasing the numbers, but I was successful in another goal: to diversify the staff, which was far too white for a city like Buffalo. I aggressively hired people of color; promoted an editorial writer, Rod Watson, to be the first black editor in newsroom management; and made Dawn Bracely the first black woman on the editorial board. After the News bought badly needed new presses in 2004, the paper’s design director, John Davis, redesigned the entire paper; the elegant new look won a slew of national awards. I started the paper’s first investigative team, and focused the staff’s journalism on inequality in the public schools and poverty in the city, where more than two of every five children lived below the poverty line. I tangled with Mayor Byron Brown over access to government information, and he wasn’t sorry to see me leave town when the time came. Our watchdog reporting was aggressive, and we got sued from time to time, but we never lost or even settled a case.
Then came 2008. It would turn out to be a terrible year for newspapers, followed by many more terrible years in a row. The country’s financial crisis and the recession that followed meant bad things for the industry. Print advertising, our lifeblood and largest revenue source, dried up. Circulation, the second greatest source of revenue, fell. And there was no workable strategy for the digital future. The rarely updated website was free, and digital advertising didn’t begin to make up for the loss of print ads.
I remember sitting in endless meetings with other members of the executive committee. I kept trying to make the case that cutting the newsroom staff was the wrong way to save money. But to some, cutting jobs seemed like the most effective way to stay in the black. Because most of the newsroom staff belonged to the Newspaper Guild, layoffs would have meant losing the most recent hires. Instead, we began rounds of voluntary buyouts, offering some of the most valuable and experienced staffers money to go away. After years of trying to get the newsroom staff above its set point of 200, I had to reconcile myself to going in the opposite direction. By the time I left in 2012, the newsroom staff was below 150. But I took a measure of pride and satisfaction in avoiding layoffs; those who left did so of their own volition, knowing that taking a buyout might be the best opportunity to retire early with some extra cash, or start a new career with a cushion of time.
But the smaller staff meant we had to make some tough decisions about coverage. No longer would we have one reporter for suburban schools and one for the city schools. No longer would we have satellite bureaus in western New York’s most populous suburbs, where citizens could walk in with a tip or a complaint. The Washington bureau, which for years had two full-time reporters, a year-round intern, and an oversized office in the National Press Building, was eventually pared down to one reporter who worked from his home. Our Sunday magazine was reduced to a monthly, and then put out of business altogether, a particularly wrenching decision because my then-husband was the magazine’s editor. No longer could we afford a full-time art critic or a full-time classical music critic. We cut way back on assignments that required travel. We thought these measures amounted to austerity at the time, and in comparison to a decade earlier, they seemed drastic. But things would get far worse.
After I departed, the entire copy desk would be dismantled, a move that many newspapers were making to streamline their skinnier operations. And the arts coverage, so important to Buffalo’s rich cultural life, withered away. There were no more staff-written movie or book reviews, no more daily “Life & Arts” section. The paper’s role as the center of the city’s cultural life was fading. After all, a newspaper’s purpose isn’t only to keep public officials accountable; it is also to be the village square for an entire metropolitan area, to help provide a common reality and touchstone, a sense of community and of place.
For me, these changes really hurt. For whatever the cost to individuals on the staff, the cost to citizens was far worse. A city that had two thriving and competing papers in the early 1980s was down to one that was hemorrhaging talent and its boots-on-the-ground reporting. Buffalo still had three television stations—affiliates of CBS, NBC, and ABC—as well as a public radio station and a twenty-four-hour cable news channel. But none of them was built to provide the type of coverage long found in the Buffalo News: granular beat and community reporting, serious arts coverage, and wide-ranging accountability journalism. “Do more with less” became a bitter industry joke. Worthy local reporting requires time, expertise, talent, and institutional knowledge. We had less of those every month, and the readers knew it. Perhaps paradoxically, I was immensely proud of the work we did and the overall quality of the paper. I felt that way until my last day on the job in August 2012, and I remain proud to be associated with the paper, which has continued to do vital work. The day I left the Buffalo News, I sat on the bare desk in my cleared-out office, and staff photographer Harry Scull came in to shoot a final portrait before we walked over to my farewell party on the fantail of the U.S.S. Little Rock, docked in Buffalo harbor. It was thirty-two years after I’d walked through the door as an ambitious summer intern, and everything—everything—had changed.