back to Niagara Falls Reporter archive
If you read the Buffalo News last weekend, you probably noticed something subtly missing from the local stories and photographs -- the names of the journalists who produced them.
It's called a byline strike, and the voluntary withholding of story and photo credits from Thursday through Sunday was the latest gambit in a labor dispute that grows more contentious by the day.
Sports columnist Jerry Sullivan, former vice-chairman of the Buffalo Newspaper Guild (Local 31026 of the Communication Workers of America) summed up the feelings of the paper's union workers at a news conference last week.
Standing in front of the Buffalo News building, Sullivan pointed down Washington Street to HSBC Arena, symbol of the recent corporate scandal that plunged Adelphia Communications into bankruptcy and led to the arrests of company founder John Rigas and sons Tim and Michael Rigas.
"Just because you don't get hauled off in handcuffs doesn't mean you're not guilty of greed," Sullivan said. Sullivan, the Guild steward for the sports department, said the insistence by Berkshire Hathaway, which owns the Buffalo News, and Chief Executive Officer Warren Buffett on enormous profit margins hurts both Western New York and its readers. Despite shrinking circulation and ad revenue, the News continues to turn a 30 percent annual profit, adding roughly $1 million per week to Berkshire Hathaway coffers.
"There's no question in our minds that the imperative to produce this $50 million profit every year clearly affects the journalism product," Sullivan said in an interview with the Niagara Falls Reporter. "We're staffed at the level of papers half our size. The notion that we can be a great regional paper is based on the idea that everybody can work twice as hard. And you just can't do it."
The Guild fought for increased staffing levels during the last labor negotiations in 1996-97. Workers in the editorial, business and circulation departments went nearly a year without a contract. But the union's efforts led to the replacement of low-paid stringers with part-time reporters (and guild members) in many coverage areas, including the News' Niagara County bureau.
That contract expired July 31. Phil Fairbanks, Buffalo News reporter and president of the Buffalo Newspaper Guild (Local 31026 of the Communications Workers of America) told the Reporter this round of negotiations with management seemed headed toward an amicable conclusion in early August. Things were going so well, with discussions centering on wages, pensions and health insurance, Guild leaders decided to cancel a planned news conference as a gesture of good will.
"We had scheduled it for Thursday (Aug. 2)," Fairbanks said. "We canceled it because we thought we had an understanding about the pension and the type of road we were headed down."
But once management negotiators had avoided the embarrassment of getting criticized publicly by their own employees, the News' position shifted sharply.
"The company came back literally hours after, on Thursday afternoon, and the company totally backtracked," Fairbanks said. "I felt like I was suckered, and I told them that."
Plenty of readers have felt the same way over the past few years. The paper's editorial position on a number of key issues for the city and the region has borne remarkable similarity to the views promoted by the Buffalo Niagara Partnership. The Partnership ostensibly serves as Erie County's Chamber of Commerce. In reality, it's little more than a mouthpiece for a cozy group of business people who also control quasi-public organizations like the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, Kaleida Health and the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority.
Partnership President and CEO Andrew Rudnick strongly advocated building a steel companion span to the existing Peace Bridge over a single, cheaper and more durable concrete replacement, stumped for a new downtown convention center and supported first building a new Children's Hospital next to Buffalo General, then closing it altogether. The Partnership also supported the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority's attempt to give control of Niagara Falls International Airport to Cintra, a secretive foreign corporation with few resources and no history of running such facilities.
In each case, the News' editorials (as directed by Publisher Stanford Lipsey, an old pal of Buffett's from Omaha, Neb.) initially supported the Partnership's position. At least until the schemes proved massively unpopular, just plain illegal, or both.
Most recently, the News repeatedly trumpeted Mark Hamister, owner of the Arena Football League's Buffalo Destroyers and chairman of the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, as the front-runner to buy the Buffalo Sabres from the Rigas family and wrest the franchise from National Hockey League control.
While the News ran extensive profiles on Hamister (whose spokesman is Earl Wells of E3 Communications, who also flacks for Mayor Irene Elia and represented Cintra until that company slunk out of town) and his efforts, it failed to mention a Canadian group headed by Sherry Bassin except in passing until late last week, after Buffalo radio stations pounded the paper on the story.
Once a near-impossibility, such lapses have become more common as Buffett slowly compressed the News staff. A 1998 "Columbia Journalism Review" article said the number of general-assignment reporters had been sliced in half, and the newsroom has shrunk via attrition in the years since. With fewer bodies available, the paper focuses heavily on covering meetings and events at the expense of in-depth reporting. Talented writers with decades of newspaper experience regularly get stuck with obituary-writing shifts. Seasoned photographers are dispatched to shoot what's disparagingly known in the industry as chicken-dinner stories.
But even as circulation plummets, Buffett's functionaries at the News focus on the bottom line. Current negotiations with the Guild center on a pension cap negotiated during the then-Buffalo Evening News' circulation war with the defunct Courier-Express more than 20 years ago, management's attempt to impose a ceiling on the company's health-insurance contributions and wage increases that lag well behind inflation.
Despite management's willingness to hire replacement workers at much lower salaries and the failure of newspaper strikes in Detroit and Pittsburgh during the past decade, Fairbanks refused to rule out a work stoppage.
"It's always an option," Fairbanks said. "It's a last resort. We have a variety of tactics we'll use before we would consider that."
Besides the byline strike, aimed at raising reader awareness of the situation, Guild members picketed and passed out leaflets at Sunday's News-sponsored jazz concert at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, a pet project of Lipsey's. Similar protests are planned if negotiating sessions scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday don't yield progress. And management's abrupt reversal during the last discussions has union leaders wary this time around.
"It's created a lot of bad feelings, that's for certain," Fairbanks said Saturday. "We're trying to come into next week's negotiations with a fresher attitude, but I'll tell you, I won't be suckered again."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | August 13 2002 |