By Harold McNeil – It remains a wonder to me that I wound up with a more than 35-year career in local print journalism, because that isn’t what I initially set out to do at all.
Despite that, it turns out I had so many unexpected benefactors in local print journalism that, in retrospect, my eventual trajectory was all but assured.
I graduated in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Broadcast Journalism from Buffalo State College which, I thought, was going to prepare me for a career as a television reporter. That never came to pass, however, because I never figured out how to properly pursue that ambition.
Instead, my first professional job in journalism came two years later in 1984 when I applied for a job as a writer/reporter in local public radio at the old WEBR Newsradio 970 station through a one-year minority apprenticeship program, in which I covered a variety of stories that ran the gamut from human to crime and local politics.
Despite my due diligence, a permanent position never materialized for me at WEBR, and after a year and a half in the program, I decided to go in another direction.
I was so enamored with the thought of a glamorous career in broadcast journalism, that I hadn’t seriously considered the possibility of a job in newspapers at the time until a few months later when I first met the then-managing editor of The Buffalo News, Foster Spencer. He and then-reporter Rod Watson attended a local Black media event that I helped organize.
Spencer and I chatted throughout the evening, and I summoned the nerve to ask for an interview, to which he agreed. Foster actually gave me a mini-tryout in which he assigned me a story to pursue and write. He reviewed it with me at my interview but determined that, while I showed promise, I was not yet ready to take on a position at The News.
“Do your time in the boonies and, in no time, you’ll be ready to work here,” Spencer told me.
I wasn’t discouraged, but I refused to leave Buffalo. Instead, I spent a few months working freelance (with an emphasis on “free”) for The Challenger, a local Black weekly, before I decided I was ready to apply for an opening at Business First.
I didn’t get the position, but Business First editor Jack Connor recommended me to the editor-in-chief of the Niagara Gazette, Mark Francis, who contacted me and offered to interview me for an entry-level reporter job.
Serendipitously, Francis received a telephone call during the middle of my interview. It was from Spencer, who advised Francis to consider hiring me for any future entry-level openings.
I can still hear a shocked Francis saying out loud to Spencer on the phone, “You won’t believe this, but he’s sitting across from me right now.”
I was hired in the fall of 1985, and for the next 3 ½ years worked alongside some fine journalists whom I came to greatly admire, and with whom I continued to work over several decades, including Bruce Andriatch, Sean Kirst, and Toni Ruberto.
It was my then-Gazette colleagues Paul Westmoore and Anne Neville who led me back to The Buffalo News. They both had spouses, Jean Westmoore and John Neville, who worked at The News. I can only assume they put in a good word for me when a position as a suburban beat reporter opened up at The News with the departure of the supremely talented Marc Lacey in the spring of 1989.
Spencer approached me on my first day as a newly minted Buffalo News staff reporter and said simply, “I told you.”
For the next 35 years, I amassed thousands of bylines in the pages of The Buffalo News, covering hard news, features, and even sports news on rare occasions. I’ve covered almost every school board and municipal beat in Western New York.
I’ve covered a couple of high-profile trials from start to finish, as well as participated in team reporting on some major local tragedies, including the Flight #3407 plane crash in Clarence in 2009 and the racist mass shooting on May 14, 2022, at the Tops Markets on Jefferson Avenue.
On the more positive side, I interviewed some national celebrities who I never expected to meet.
I also got to work with colleagues Susan Schulman in 1992 and Deidre Williams in 2004 on two separate, multi-part series that explored local race relations in Erie County, of which I am particularly proud.
It wasn’t the glamorous career in TV news that I had envisioned, but my career in local print journalism was more fulfilling than I could have imagined doing the work that I did and working with all the wonderfully talented journalists with whom I was privileged to work over a career spanning nearly four decades.
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This article is part of the Fall/Winter 2024-25 edition of The Frontier Reporter.
Buffalo Newspaper Guild CWA Local 31026 