Challenge to The Buffalo News: Why should I renew my subscription?

Here’s a challenge for Sheila Rayam, the still relatively new editor-in-chief of The Buffalo News.

My print subscription runs out sometime in the next week or so. Why should I resubscribe?

I’m a hardcore print person. As someone who worked in newspapers for 27 years, who loves designing publications and who loves reading them, there’s ink running in my veins. For that matter, I even draw a monthly retirement check from The News (I worked there for 23 years).

But it seems like The News has done everything possible over the past few years — especially since it was purchased by Lee Enterprises in 2020 — to drive me away from it.

• Local community news has been abandoned, with a few communities left with their coverage through the Sun weeklies (which The News owns). The town I live in — just 20 miles from downtown Buffalo — is virtually invisible in the pages of The News, with the exceptions of high school sports playoffs and the occasional real estate listing.
• Local arts coverage has been abandoned, as well. Gusto, the arts & entertainment section, seems to have no staff writers dedicated to writing for it. For a long time my career dream was to be part of that stable of critics. Coverage of the local music scene has all but disappeared, with show listings gone from the print edition and the online calendar a joke. Only “promoted events” seem to be listed, and it appears that “The Hawk” — and that’s the Diamond Hawk Golf Course & Pub, not the Mohawk Place — must be dropping a lot of money on those.
  Both the listings and the overall coverage are a shadow of that section in its heyday, when The News had a full arts staff along with its stable of freelancers. (BTW, since I started writing this column, music critic Jeff Miers has left The News, leaving the paper with no writers dedicated to covering the arts)
• The comics section was destroyed. When three quarters of the comics were dropped last year, The News said that comics would be available online. But the King Syndicate comics aren’t, and it’s impossible to find them on the website. So why even bother with the pretense?
• The website itself is a disaster, painful to navigate. There are days when you can sense the local control being pulled away and decisions being made in some place like Munster, Ind., or Madison, Wis. Stories that are important are hard to find, and mistakes are made on obvious matters when writing teaser headlines for stories inside the paper. By the way, it’s educational to check out the workplace reviews at the design mills that are creating pages for Lee papers across the county.
• There’s been a big push for business coverage, but that’s not really something I’m all that interested in. The national and international coverage is all from sources that I already have access to through my online subscriptions to the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press.
• So what is left? A few of my friends are still there, and they’re doing great work, as they always have. Some are high profile and others are doing the less recognized basic work of newspapering. But there are far fewer of them. Is that enough to justify continuing to subscribe to a paper that I find less and less of interest to read?
• Add onto that the fact that there have been numerous days when the paper hasn’t been delivered (and I’m talking about normal weather days, not blizzard conditions) and that the official price tag on the paper edition has risen to over $900.
  Now The News is moving its printing to Cleveland. That should make the deadlines even more untenable for the remaining reporters and editors, and the chances of not getting a paper in my newspaper box will be even higher.

So Ms. Rayam … I believe we share an interest in the future of news and, specifically, in The Buffalo News. After all, I teach students who want to build that future. I realize that you’re constrained by the ownership you’ve worked for since last July, but I believe in news and I’m willing to pay for it (although probably not $900 a year).

Can you convince me a future exists at The Buffalo News and that paying for a paper edition still makes sense?