The Press: The Voice of Buffalo

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The city room, tidy and peaceful as any library, is free of the crumpled balls of copy paper and other litter usually found around working newsmen. No smoke hangs blue above the desks; by executive order in the interest of "increased efficiency," smoking is prohibited. To make phone calls, most reporters retire to soundproofed glass booths along the wall; when they want a copy boy, they do not shout, but press a buzzer button. The big room has an almost palpable serenity, helped along by the sight of the old-fashioned dust jackets worn by some of the copyreaders.

Upon this scene, every midmorning, arrives the Buffalo Evening News's editor, Alfred Henry Kirchhofer—an austere, bony-cheeked man of 67 in rimless glasses and a dark blue suit. He looks much like Woodrow Wilson, a resemblance not fancied by Kirchhofer, who, like his paper, is a lifelong, rootstock Republican. Two feet six inches away from Kirchhofer's desk a visitor's chair is bolted to the floor; that is as close as Kirchhofer wants anyone to approach. Before long a flurry of blue memos pours from his desk to every department. Sensing the news possibilities in some current local development, Kirchhofer hands out the assignment. "I can't put my hands on the fish," he says, "but the smell is there." By two o'clock, with the help of 190 respectful and sometimes awe-struck editorial staffers, Editor Kirchhofer has produced an other issue of the newspaper that is as much a part of Buffalo as its 400,000 city-owned trees.

Local in Flavor. The Buffalo News is a big (circ. 285,206), powerful and prosperous example of the U.S. provincial daily, whose voice rings commandingly at home but is rarely heard outside. The News's province embraces eight upstate New York counties, of which Buffalo (pop. 607,000), Erie County seat, is the industrial core. To the 1,642,500 inhabitants of its territory, the News speaks loudly of things they want to hear.

The paper is intensely local in flavor; it devotes nearly as much space to domestic news as it does to national news. One of its most popular features is a three-to four-column chronicle of Buffalo items, headed "Daily News Summary" and set in eye-straining agate type. Here the News reports birth, traffic mishap, burglary, blaze, marriage license, missing person, court judgment, bankruptcy and stolen car. Deaths, society notices, club meetings and high school athletic contests get more generous shares of space.

The city's brawling political affairs, in which dozens of factions spiritedly divide along party, ethnic and religious lines, are covered with the thoroughness of a paper whose editor believes that "politics and government turn out to be our job." The News's Republicanism, usually confined to the editorial page, gives local Democrats the conniptions. Just last month Mayor Frank A. Sedita, a Democrat, went on television to bewail what he considered lopsided News coverage of his office. But between swipes at the paper, the mayor reads it attentively, takes all but two of the seven daily editions, and in cooler moments has been heard to say that "the news pages have been fair to my administration."