Look for a major shakeup next month at the Niagara Gazette and its sister papers in Lockport, Tonawanda and Medina. Sources close to the group's Alabama ownership told the Reporter last week that the papers' financial situation is so bleak that the possibility exists that one or more of them might be closed.
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The group is ranked near the bottom of Community Newspapers Holdings Inc.'s more than 300 papers nationwide in terms of revenue generated.
Part of the problem is that CNHI paid too much for the papers to begin with. They paid $24 million for the Gazette in 1997 after it had been valued at around $18 million by three independent newspaper appraisers, for example.
Advertising revenue taken away following the launch of the Reporter in June 2000 hasn't helped either.
But the biggest problem facing the Gazette's parent corporation is the collapse of USAir. CNHI, which was financed by the Alabama state employees' pension fund, poured hundreds of millions of dollars of money generated by its newspapers into the bankrupt airline.
The company has had difficulty making its required payments to the State of Alabama, and recently had to seek new financing from GE-Wachovia Securities to cover its obligations. The moneymen redlined a number of CNHI papers in making the loan, and the Niagara group didn't make the cut.
The problems at the Gazette scream for attention. An Oct. 20 front-page story by Rick Pfeiffer is a case in point. The headline, plastered across the top of the page, screamed, "New casino plan proposed."
In breathless tones, Pfeiffer described a "closed door meeting" held in "(State Sen. George) Maziarz's Lockport offices." The upshot of the meeting was that Maziarz had signed off on a deal that would turn 100 percent of the local share of the state's casino revenue directly over to the city, which would then be responsible for distributing the cash, the story claimed.
A real scoop, except it never happened.
"As far as I'm concerned, there wasn't one factual statement in that article that was true," Maziarz told me last week.
To begin with, the meeting wasn't held at Maziarz's office, and wasn't even held behind closed doors. It was held over breakfast in a popular Lockport eatery. In addition to Maziarz, attendees included state Sen. Byron Brown, Assemblywoman Francine Del Monte, Niagara Falls Schools Superintendent Carmen Granto and Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center President Joseph Ruffolo.
Not only did Maziarz refuse to sign off on any plan that would send 100 percent of the money to Niagara Falls City Hall, he said any legislation proposed by Brown and Del Monte to do so would be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled state Senate.
"I can assure you, this would be a non-starter," he said.
Maziarz backs a plan that would give 75 percent of the revenue -- estimated at more than $12 million this year -- directly to the city, with the remaining 25 percent to be divided between the school district, the hospital, the Niagara Tourism and Convention Corp. and development at Niagara Falls international Airport.
Pfeiffer is touted as the most experienced beat reporter the Gazette has. He either allowed himself to be snookered into writing a fictional story by people with an agenda or he simply fabricated it out of whole cloth.
In any event, it isn't pretty.
If you experienced an eerie sense of deja vu reading Louise Freeman's Oct. 23 fundamentalist Christian Guest View in the Gazette, you were not alone. Published under the headline "We need to unite this country now," Freeman's piece rambled on for 800 words about how God wants us to re-elect President Bush.
The reason so many of us came away with that spooky feeling of having been there before is because we had. The Gazette published the exact same Guest View, under the headline "Vote the right man into presidential office," on Sept. 15.
According to Freeman, who is identified as a "student and resident of Niagara Falls," homosexuality, abortion and other "immorality" here in the United States resulted in God's retribution and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on our country. And the Gazette saw fit not only to print this garbage, but to print it twice.
Again, it gets down to an editor either pushing an agenda or being asleep at the switch.
The once proud Niagara Gazette now finds itself lost in a miasma of corporate greed, editorial mediocrity and a loser mentality that permitted the Niagara Falls Reporter to become the success that it has.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Nov. 1 2004 |