Digital Buffalo Reflects A City On The Rise

Most Buffalonians will agree: Their city has an image problem. Having long passed its steel manufacturing heyday and its shipping prominence via the Erie Canal, it has for decades been saddled with an unflattering portrait: Post-industrial Rust Belt relic. Aging infrastructure and population. Unpluggable drain of youth bound for better jobs elsewhere.

And don’t even get started on the snow.

But other signs point to a Buffalo in cautious, if not dramatic, resurgence: A growing downtown medical corridor. Public and private revitalization efforts. An NHL franchise swelling with a new owner’s deep pocketbook and ambitions. All of them are helping to lift the spirits of a bruised city and the prospects of a growing digital news market.

Buffalonians are ready to fight back against their bad rep. “I’ve never met more people who were more proud of their area but more defensive at the same time,” said Mike Nurse, the station manager and vice president of sales for WKBW, the local ABC affiliate owned by Granite Broadcasting.

But Buffalonians can also admit their mistakes, one of them being the sluggish translation of its media outlets to the digital market. The Buffalo News, the city’s only remaining daily newspaper, is Buffalo’s strongest local site with 34.3% of local adults visiting BuffaloNews.com and its sister site, Buffalo.com, in a given month according to data from The Media Audit. But even the online news leader took its time embracing the dynamic, 24-hour nature of the Internet.

“We were one of the last major metro papers to post updates to our site during the day,” Buffalo News managing editor Brian Connolly said.

Meanwhile, at the city’s three network affiliate Web sites, a mobile front is taking shape, but only one site, WGRZ.com, a Gannett-owned NBC affiliate, is offering a weather-specific app in a city where “weather is king,” according to one media executive.

But if Buffalo isn’t as far along digitally as other -- sometimes smaller -- markets, it has been dealing with variables that many other cities have not. One is population; according to data from Borrell Associates, the city’s population of 1,581,570 skews older with a 39.9 year-old median age. “For better or for worse it’s an aging market,” said Chris Woodard, Internet director for the Lin Media-owned CBS affiliate WIVB.com. “One good thing that comes from that is a sense of history and longevity to the stories.”

One reason for the older population is the city’s relatively soft real estate market according to Jack Connors, publisher of BusinessFirstofBuffalo.com, which is owned by American City Business Journals, a division of Advance Publications. “Many older West New Yorkers don’t move to Florida or the Southwest for retirement because they don’t have the equity in their homes like you would if you lived in a suburban New York area,” he said. “The ability for people to cash in on real estate investments is probably a bit stunted here compared with other areas of the country.”

Like so many other U.S. markets, the economy -- real estate and otherwise -- is the biggest ongoing story in Buffalo, and locals are looking to the news to make sense of -- and help keep honest -- a revitalization effort with a number of moving parts. “People are now tracking more of what’s being done and they’re looking to the news to try to find those answers for them,” Woodard said.

This revitalization has percolated into much of the city’s news content. The headline is a new medical corridor, fueled by plans for the University of Buffalo to move its medical school off its main campus and into a new facility just north of downtown. This would buttress an area already populated with several hospitals that have merged and relocated there along with the University of Buffalo Center for Bioinformatics, Cleveland Labs and other R&D and medical support facilities that have been building up.

A sidebar follows public investment in the Erie Canal Harbor waterfront area, which has been developed with an entertainment focus including kayaking and a sailboat, the Spirit of Buffalo, that has been offering harbor cruises.

An ongoing story is that industry never entirely left the area. Dunlap tires are still manufactured there, and General Motors still builds powertrains in the area. The city maintains a healthy banking hub -- HSBC Bank has major operations in the city, as does Key Bank and M&T Bank. Other companies, including Delaware North, which runs concession stands in stadiums around the country, and Rich Products, a food manufacturer, are also headquartered there.

Revitalization has become the raison d’être for at least one site, BuffaloRising.com, according to founder and editor Newell Nussbaumer. Founded in print in 2003 and having moved exclusively online three years ago, Buffalo Rising is one of the city’s few independent sites with about 25,000 unique visitors a month, many drawn to the site’s upbeat vision of a 21st century city. “There is a huge amount of civic pride these days and our commercial districts are thriving,” Nussbaumer, a lifelong Buffalonian, said. Citing outsiders’ visions of “a Rust Belt, snow-covered city,” he said, “Those images are hard to shake, and that’s why our writers write.”