The Press: In Buffalo

Within the town of Buffalo
Are prosy men with leaden eyes;
Like ants they worry to and fro,
Important men in Buffalo. . . .

Poet Vachel Lindsay, who has hymned many cities, played up the prosy aspect of “this Buffalo, this recreant town,” to get a contrast for the “deathless glory” of nearby Niagara Falls. He reported “sharps and lawyers, prune and tame; Jew pioneers in Buffalo”; and journalists “sick of ink.”

How badly misrepresented have been the enthusiastic journalists of Buffalo was seen last week when the Courier and the Express amalgamated, with the announcement: “The Courier and Express believes in Buffalo and shares with others the vision of ‘A Million City’ in a relatively few years. . . . There can be no transaction of greater moment to the people than a transaction like this, which touches the whole people from an angle particularly personal to them.

“The amalgamation is born of the absolute conviction that the morning newspaper is the newspaper of the future. . . .”

What has happened in Buffalo is just the reverse of what took place last fortnight in Cleveland (TIME, June 14). There, the Plain Dealer’s accidental monopoly of the morning field was threatened by the purchase of the Times by able Publisher Earle E. Martin. In Buffalo, monopoly of the morning field was systematically secured to the new Courier and Express, doubtless through the sagacity of Publisher-Politician-Sportsman William J. (“Fingy”) Connors of the Courier, at whose plant the new sheet was published and whose son, William J. Jr., was announced as the new publisher. Besides the Express there was no other morning paper competing with the Courier.

Buffalo has two other publishers and newspapers of note, both in her evening field. There is Publisher Norman E. Mack of the Times, onetime (1908) national Democratic chairman. And there is energetic Publisher Edward H. Butler, Yale graduate, Republican, who so far from being “sick of ink” runs his Evening News in a model establishment and has lately accepted the office of vice-president in the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association (TIME, May 3).