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The past few weeks have been unusually comical ones in the journalism racket here on the Niagara Frontier, particularly for those jokers putting their time in over at the Niagara Gazette.
On Sunday, April 21, venerable Gazette columnist Don Glynn did a piece about Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Hanchette taking a professorship in journalism at St. Bonaventure University. Simple enough, the two were colleagues and pals years ago when the Gazette actually put out a decent paper.
Hanchette went on to edit papers in Arkansas and Florida, serve as a founding staffer at USA Today, and cover the Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations for Gannett News Service. In addition to the Pulitzer, he has also won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award (twice), the Silver Gavel Award for legal reporting (twice), the John Hancock Award for financial reporting (twice), the Clarion Award (twice), the Worth Bingham Award, the Society of Professional Journalists Award for public service and the National Headliners Award.
One thing Glynn forgot to mention -- or that his editors cut in a fit of pique -- is that Hanchette's insightful commentary and world-class prose can be read each and every week on Page Five of the Niagara Falls Reporter. Perhaps the fact that the only Pulitzer winner working for any newspaper in Western New York decided to hook up with us was simply too painful to bear.
Glynn's lapse was followed on Wednesday, April 24, by a line or two Pat Bradley wrote based on the cover story about county Youth Director Teresa Holland we'd done the day before. Coyly, Bradley referred only to "published reports" in his article, completely neglecting to mention us.
Now, Bradley's a seasoned journalist and ought to know as well as anyone that, when you steal something from a copyrighted source, you're supposed to attribute it.
Tom Prohaska did the same thing in his Buffalo News piece on Holland, citing "reports published in a weekly newspaper."
Staba and I steal stuff all the time, but at least we're honest enough to tell our readers where we stole it from.
Had Woodward and Bernstein -- I mean Bradley and Prohaska -- simply looked through their own papers' back numbers when Holland was first appointed in January, they would have spared themselves the ignominy of being scooped on their own beats by a free weekly they try to pretend doesn't exist.
The same thing happened on Feb. 19, when we broke the story about Mayor Irene Elia's irrational dismissal of Red Bull North America's attempt to stage a major snowboarding event here. Elia's decision was ultimately overturned, but not before the News' Niagara Bureau and the Gazette scrambled to play catch-up to the Reporter with a combined 10 stories and editorials on the subject.
So lame have the news-gathering abilities of Niagara County's daily papers become that the Gazette has resorted to the desperate measure of publishing Jerry Springer-like pleas for sources on its local news page.
"Have you been victimized by a deadbeat parent or are you a deadbeat yourself? If so, we'd like to hear from you," ran last week's offering.
It's enough to send a shiver up your spine. The next stage on this road to perdition may have already been taken by one of the Gazette's sister papers in the poverty row Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. chain. According to a Feb. 27 article in the Baptist News -- see guys, attribution! -- the CNHI-owned Edmond (Okla.) Sun was using its recently upgraded presses to print pornography during the off-hours.
But I'm not complaining. It's not like we don't have our friends in the media. WBEN radio talk show host Tom Bauerle regularly refers to -- and even reads from -- the Reporter on his morning show and Rich Newberg, senior correspondent at Channel 4, was very generous in promoting our efforts following the expose we did on Kaleida Health Care. Best-selling author and Buffalo News reporter Dan Herbeck has written about the Reporter's aggressive coverage of Laborers Local 91 and the subsequent scrapes we got into because of it.
Of course, Herbeck, Newberg and Bauerle are professionals.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 30 2002 |