31° and Freezing fog
I picked up a copy of The Bee weekly newspaper the other day.
It looked about the same as it always has, a weekly chronicle of all the good news happening in suburban Amherst.
The police blotter is, intentionally, whimsical. Amherst, Clarence, West Seneca and all are presented as Mayberry with the occasional house fire or car crash thrown in to keep the appearance of reality and give proper respect for firefighters and law enforcement. Government coverage often reads like meeting minutes.
Most of it is a steady diet of things like high school sports and The Jolly Boys erecting a new swingset at a park on South Long Street.
The Bee news group was recently sold by the Measer family to the Sample News Group. Sample News Group already has the Batavia Daily News and publications out east.
It’s not as big, and evil of a conglomerate as Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. the Alabama State Teachers Retirement fund subsidiary presiding over the slow death of the Niagara Gazette and Lockport Union Sun & Journal.
Usually the transition from small, responsible ownership to corporate raiders ends badly for the community. CNHI came to town and put incompetent leadership in charge in Lockport and Niagara, which were both losing money about 30 years ago. They then shifted as many expenses as possible to Medina and Tonawanda, which were profitable, thus propping up losers at the expense of winners.
Eventually they brought in a corporate vagabond to further cut things, and close down the two papers they had already wrecked, leaving behind a skeletal staff to publish a pseudo-newspaper 5 days a week.
Along the way they dumped real estate, including the historic Gazette building as well as the US&J headquarters.
Buffalo News has undergone a similar decline since Warren Buffett sold it to the corporate vultures at Lee Enterprises. The most tragic recent turn is moving printing to Cleveland. I read the electronic version daily. Subscription renewal time is comical. I think last time it started at $450 for the year and, by the time I finished chewing out the English-as-a-second language call center rep I was down to $150 for the year.
In recent weeks, on multiple occasions, the printed home delivery copies were unavailable because of snow along Lake Erie. How did they not anticipate that?
The paper is in a constant battle with its guild, negotiating which bodies to throw overboard while still advertising openings at www.journalismjobs.com hoping to find new horses to ride hard and put away wet.
As I thought about that tragic abandonment of community journalism, I pondered the masthead inside the recent edition Bee.
From 1907 until 2024 there was a George Measer listed as publisher. 117 years is a long time.
George Sr. was publisher from 1907 to 1965. George Jr. was publisher from 1965 to 1994. Trey Measer (George III) took over in 1994 and rode it into the sunset.
Brian Nalepa is now listed as president. Heather Zerillo is the publisher.
In the time I worked there, as editor of the East Aurora and Clarence Bees for about 6 years, George Jr. was publisher.
He wore bowties, loved the Rotary and fire department and was kind of a comical character.
He would leave press releases for his friends on editors’ desks with a sticky note “Must Go! GJM”
Other times, when we were goofing off, he would stroll through the cube farm and bark “more keystrokes! Less chatter.”
He enforced a dress code – everyone needed to wear a tie. We were all 20-something, starting our careers in journalism, some to last, some to move on to public relations, teaching or even financial advising. Lots of people didn’t like him. I did. I viewed him as sort of a grandfatherly throwback to a past era.
Some of us were single, others married with infants or no kids. An older woman, all of 36, joined us from Shreveport. Her husband was in grad school at UB. They drank like no one I had ever seen and somehow held it well, leading us to endless happy hours at the Eagle House.
We even put together a media league softball team back when there were enough people working in media to form teams. Eventually, Trey became concerned the Bee could be liable if someone got hurt. Then our team became “Not the Bee.”
If the newspaper business is still the newspaper business, and the Bee is not some eye in the calm of a massively declining hurricane, the downward spiral into oblivion will commence shortly. It will be time for "do more, get more, cut our way to prosperity."
Those times about which I reminisce were the Halcyon days. We didn’t know how good they were until they passed. I guess that’s just the way it works. Best wishes to anyone still working there. May you look fondly upon your time in the hive.
