Time flies when you're having fun.
This week, the Niagara Falls Reporter begins its 10th year of publication, despite the predictions of many in the community who forecast early on that it wouldn't last 10 weeks.
Starting out as a free, 5,000-circulation fortnightly on June 28, 2000, the paper went weekly in 2001 and now boasts a circulation of 22,000. Each and every Tuesday, we put more copies out on the street than any other newspaper in Niagara County. And we're still free.
Nine years ago, Bill Clinton was president, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the senior senator from New York, John LaFalce served as our congressman, and Irene Elia occupied the mayor's office at City Hall. Rob Daly was our state assemblyman, the Seneca Niagara Casino was just a dream, and Vincenzo V. Anello was working as an electrician and plotting his political comeback as a city councilman. America was at peace, the twin towers of the World Trade Center stood proud in Lower Manhattan and the Dow was up 23 points to close at 10527.
It all seems like a very long time ago.
Then-councilwoman Fran Iusi tactfully announced at the party we threw to celebrate our first edition that the Reporter was a bad idea, poorly executed, and that the paper would be lucky to last a month.
The canny business acumen she demonstrated that night would be rewarded a few years later when Mayor Paul Dyster named her as the city's director of business development. That's not a joke. Iusi really is the business development director of Niagara Falls, with the authority to decide which businesses will or will not receive taxpayer-funded grants and loans.
Our offices were then located at the Oxy building at Third and Niagara streets downtown. The great Frank Amendola made us an offer we couldn't refuse -- free rent for the first month. Monsignor William Stillwell, then pastor at St. Mary's, stopped by and sprinkled Holy Water about while saying a prayer for our new venture.
After that, the Reporter staff could generally be located at Mickey Rimmen's Arterial Lounge or Flo Acotto's Press Box restaurant across the street, fun spots where politicians and wiseguys and cops hung out and everything was strictly off the record.
Since then, the casino opened, the Senecas took over our building, and the Arterial and the Press Box went out of business. There's progress for you. Frank and the monsignor passed away even as the phonies and the creeps and the jerks proliferated.
Journalistically, I wanted the Reporter to present the news in the way that newspaper people do when they're talking among themselves as opposed to actually writing for their publications. Even the dumbest guy on the police beat knows a lot more than he tells his readers, and I've never understood why that is so.
While our launch garnered a line or two in Don Glynn's column and a brief item in the Buffalo News, stories and columns published in the Reporter have since been cited by CNN, MSNBC, the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Toronto Life, Editor & Publisher, Salon and many other major media outlets.
The 34 taverns, restaurants, barber shops and retail stores that carried the first edition have mushroomed into more than 500 distribution points, and readers from Buffalo, the Tonawandas, Lockport, Niagara Falls and all the towns and villages in between snap the paper up as quickly as we can get copies out.
The Reporter Web site has attracted an additional 3 million visitors, hailing from every state in the Union and every continent on the face of the earth, including Antarctica. At the time of its launch, on July 1, 2000, it was the first Web site to be operated by any Niagara County-based news organization, and we regularly field e-mailed questions from readers around the globe who ask about the area's history, amenities, attractions and accommodations.
Sadly, many of the businesses that advertised in the first issue no longer exist, but others have come along to fill the gap and ensure that we're able to keep publishing. We've burned through several million dollars of ad revenue over the years, though it seems like a high-wire act every week as we add up the checks to see whether there's enough to do it again next Tuesday.
One thing that hasn't changed is the childish theft of our newspapers by the ne'er-do-wells we often find ourselves writing about. Our papers are regularly filched these days from the City Hall newsstand and the Parkway Condominiums, which houses the offices of the Maid of the Mist Corp. We still have pictures of convicted labor racketeer Mark Congi stealing them from a local pizza joint some years back, but at least he had the stones to steal them himself.
It's our understanding that City Administrator Donna Owens assigns someone to remove the papers, and Maid of the Mist owner James Glynn was out of town for a long time, so somebody must be doing it for him as well. Not that it matters. Taking 50 or even 100 copies still leaves 21,900 or so for people to read, and it's not as though nobody has a computer.
Another thing that hasn't changed over the years is the rich mine Niagara Falls provides to supply the raw material for what we do. No sooner has one lazy, inept, dim-witted, crazy or downright corrupt public official been booted out of office than another takes his or her place. Sometimes they're Republicans and sometimes they're Democrats, but they're always around and we've enjoyed a rollicking good time at their expense.
We've published 422 issues containing some 4,196 stories and more than 12,500 display ads. That amounts to many tons of newsprint and who knows how many barrels of printer's ink.
The last nine years have been tough ones for the newspaper business in general, and for those on the Niagara Frontier in particular. The exodus of people away from the region continues, and the Internet has put a dent into newspaper readership everywhere.
Circulation at the Buffalo News and the Niagara Gazette has plummeted, and weekly papers such as the Buffalo Current, Alt Press, the Buffalo Beast, Blue Dog, the Amherst Record, Buffalo Beat and Buffalo Rising, along with the monthly magazine PoliticsWNY, have come and gone with no one to mourn them except their investors.
No one can predict the future, of course, even though the all-knowing geeks and pundits who call themselves bloggers pretend to do it all the time. Back in June of 2000, when the Gazette and the News were paying their owners returns of up to 30 percent on their investments, the thought of launching a rag-tag independent weekly scraping to barely break even each week seemed comical, even to your humble correspondent.
Now it's the dailies that are struggling to get by. They're doing it by slashing personnel, making their papers smaller and pinching pennies at their readers' expense. They never saw it coming and have no one in management who knows anything about running a lean but effective news operation. They still see their newspapers in terms of "product" that they have to "sell."
That's a loser mentality, a philosophy of avarice that has sent their readers away in droves.
It was the great Chicago newspaperman Finley Peter Dunne who, late in the 19th century, first offered up the journalistic charge to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." It is a mission statement we've taken to heart. So while we've made a bit of money and had a lot of fun over the last nine years, we've tried to live up to that standard.
Take the long-gone former management of Kaleida Health Care Systems or the corrupt former leadership of Laborers Local 91 here. Throw in the funny former mayor Irene Elia and the seriously indicted ex-mayor Vince Anello. Then there was former Parkway Condominiums superintendent Judith Dale, who copped a plea. And don't forget the geniuses who used to run the Gazette.
At the same time, the Reporter has managed to raise well over $100,000 altogether for Community Missions, still offers half-price advertising for not-for-profit organizations, and gave thousands to the Northtowns Animal Shelter to partially offset all the good work they do for free in Niagara County in the absence of a functional SPCA here.
We try and do what we can.
From all of us here at the Reporter, thanks to all of you for reading and advertising.
And here's to another great year.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 30 2009 |