'Community Matters' only not at the Gazette

The Falls Police blotter on Shredd and Ragan is a tired schtick that reflects poorly on Niagara Falls and must go. I hope that doesn’t mean the Gazette needs to die first but it has done 20 years of damage in convincing people the Falls is a shithole.

Hopefully it will be enough when Rick Pfeiffer retires.

The Gazette publisher, Cheryl Phillips lives in Newfane. I like her but don’t believe she cares enough about our city to shut down Shredd and Ragan or stand up to Rick.

It’s one of the only reasons most people in Western New York know the Gazette still publishes. The thing is, Shredd and Ragan don’t help sell subscriptions or advertising. Shredd and Ragan, with Pfeiffer’s help, brand Niagara Falls as an awful place. It depresses real estate values, and hurts the community.

Daily above the flag the paper reminds people “Community Matters.” Then it enables Shredd and Ragan to use the Falls as a punchline, so not really.

The Gazette got a bump last year when Lee Enterprises moved what is left of the Buffalo News press run to Cleveland and a bunch of small print jobs moved to the CNHI printing plant in North Tonawanda.

The 97 Rock morning show is the main reason people in white America Trumplican backwaters across Western New York think Niagara Falls is a shithole. People listen to the radio while driving to work.

Talk to someone from Hamburg, Cheektowaga or Alden and they will tell you the Falls is a shithole. It’s a branding perception fortified by years of the Gazette advertising on Shredd and Ragan that Niagara Falls is a crime-filled cesspool.

They even go misogynistic, branding our woman as “Falls chicks” hard drinking, smoking bar wenches ready for anything.

Matt Winterhalter, the editor who no one knows, lives in Tonawanda. He is burned out. If he once had the soul of a journalist it died of atrophy. Either that or apathy set in.

If someone in the community mentions the paper to me, which happens almost never because it has no presence, they never know or have met Phillips or Winterhalter. Sometimes they have a memory of John Celestino.

John and I saw eye-to-eye only because we were the same height. He lived down the hill in Lewiston and had a blind spot for the Black community in the Falls.

It made him uncomfortable that I was accepted in all parts of the community and wrote about it. I was supposed to stay in my lane, the way Sharon Bailey, the columnist I hired does.

He didn’t like that I expressed the real emotion of someone who lived most of his life in upper class white communities and expressed one trope semi-regularly – every time my own prejudice made me fear a young man because of how he looked, I engaged and found my fear unfounded and a new friend. It happened recently at the dog park.

I was getting my haircut the other day and saw a hard copy of the paper for the first time in months. There was a double truck, two full pages of legals. When Lee Enterprises jacks its legal ad rates in the Buffalo News, and the Gazette remains cheaper, even when printed copies are less than 2000 daily, those ads flock to Niagara and the Lockport Union Sun & Journal.

People starting an LLC have to publish somewhere because of an archaic State law. CNHI is the cheapest available option.

Obits are an equal racket. Everyone wants their loved one’s obit in the paper, no matter the cost. The fees charged for obits and legal notices are carefully shrouded but increase annually at a rate equal to the decline in circulation. The same goes for the cost of home delivery.

And so it goes that as the Gazette dies a slow, painful death and facilitates the regular trashing of our community on the radio, revenue somehow continues until the day of death.