Eight years is a long time.
When the first edition of the Niagara Falls Reporter hit the streets, eight years ago this week, Bill Clinton sat in the White House, the last war our country was involved in was Vietnam and gas was under $2 a gallon.
Irene Elia was the mayor here, Barb Geracitano and John Accardo sat on the City Council, and the Seneca Niagara Casino was just a dream. You could get a fine meal or an expertly mixed cocktail at John's Flaming Hearth, the Alps, the Press Box, Dante's, Parrone's or a half dozen other places that aren't there anymore.
The paper was a fragile thing then, coming out just once every two weeks and in an edition of only 5,000 copies, with circulation limited mostly to downtown Niagara Falls. Few gave the Reporter much hope, and more than a few politicians, racketeers and unscrupulous business people went out of their way to hurry the paper toward what they believed would be its inevitable demise.
In 2001, the Reporter went weekly, and the number of places where news-hungry readers could pick up a copy grew from 26 to more than 500.
"The Niagara Falls Reporter has earned a reputation for breaking the big stories, and showing a bright light on the shadier crannies of Niagara Falls politics," Mayor Paul Dyster said. "Inch by inch, step by step, our local politics are getting cleaner, and the Reporter deserves credit for pushing the envelope."
The troubled Western New York economy itself hasn't been kind to alternative publications in general. Alt Press, Blue Dog, Buffalo Beat, Buffalo Current, The Beast, PoliticsWNY and Buffalo Rising are a handful of challengers that have folded completely or come to publish so irregularly that, for all practical purposes, they have ceased to exist, since the Reporter began publication.
Many of these failures can be traced to the publications' decisions to compete in the highly competitive Buffalo media marketplace, where the Buffalo News, Artvoice, Buffalo Spree, three television stations, a dozen radio stations and a number of neighborhood and ethnic publications battle relentlessly for their share of dwindling advertising revenue.
The current, wider debate in the newspaper business centers on whether or not newspapers as we know them can even survive much further into the 21st century. Many of the prognosticators predict a grim future for the entire business nationwide.
Locally, the Niagara Gazette, Tonawanda News and Lockport Union-Sun and Journal have seen paid circulation plummet by 40 percent and more. Soaring newsprint and fuel costs, a generally depressed economy and a far less literate audience are the main culprits.
But while the Reporter faces many of the same challenges as other newspapers, we've been fortunate enough to attract a special kind of reader. Loyal to a fault, the 22,000 people who pick up a copy of the paper every week -- and the 10,000 weekly online readers all around the world -- often harbor intense feelings for the unique blend of breaking local news and informed opinion that has come to define the Reporter's signature style.
They congratulate us when we succeed and chastise us when we fail. While this can add greatly to the time it takes to eat a meal in a restaurant, the feedback is always gratifying.
Locally, our long-running expose of the criminal element within Laborers Local 91 and the investigative pieces that led to the seating of a federal grand jury to investigate official corruption at Niagara Falls City Hall under the administration of former mayor Vince Anello are the stories people cite the most. Nationally, the biggest splash came when we asked Rep. Louise Slaughter to look into a how fake reporter using a fake name found his way into the White House press corps.
That story earned us citations on CNN, MSNBC, Salon, the Washington Post and numerous other national media outlets after the congresswoman attached a copy of the editorial to a public letter she sent to President George W. Bush.
Our ongoing battle with the Niagara Gazette garnered favorable coverage in Editor & Publisher and the Columbia Journalism Review, and our expose of the obscene bonuses paid to executives at Kaleida Health Care -- even as they cried poor trying to justify the closure of Buffalo Children's Hospital -- led to a nearly complete turnover in the company's management after the Buffalo television stations picked up on it.
While mistakes have been made -- our endorsement of Anello in the 2003 mayoral election being the most egregious -- we've apologized and attempted to pay penance.
"The future's uncertain and the end is always near," Jim Morrison once sang, and here at the Reporter we've lived with that reality week in and week out since that first edition began changing the way readers on the Niagara Frontier think about the news. The wolf is always at the door, though, and certainly the fact that the Reporter's lasted this long must be regarded as something of a miracle.
And so it is that miracle we'll celebrate this week. Eight years of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable in a small town with a famous name. It has been a pleasure to become a part of the history of this place, a force for change and, hopefully, for the good of the community.
Sorry again about the Anello endorsement.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 24 2008 |