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Independence

A newsroom answerable to its readers

A free press is not a slogan. It is a newsroom that no city official, no party and no advertiser gets to edit.

The Buffalo Chronicle is independently owned. We do not belong to a newspaper chain or a media conglomerate. Our editorial judgments are our own. Advertisers and sponsors do not influence our news coverage — a line we draw in public, and keep.

That independence has a cost. Reporting takes time, records, travel and the patience to stay with a story after the first day’s news has moved on. A subscription is how this work is paid for, and how we stay answerable to readers instead of to a corporate owner.

Western New York

The local issues that matter to this community

Western New York is not a bureau of somewhere else. It is a set of communities — the city, the suburbs, Niagara County, the border — living with decisions made in City Hall, in school board chambers, in town halls and in Albany.

We cover those decisions where they land. When Buffalo schools’ finance chief warns that the district could run out of cash without a closure vote, we report it. When Lancaster police publish their first annual report on use of force, we read it and tell you what is in it. When Canadian car trips into the region begin to return but truck traffic over the Peace Bridge does not, we follow the numbers across the border.

This is the work of a local newspaper: to take this region’s civic life seriously, on ordinary Tuesdays as well as on election night.

Accountability

Investigative reporting that holds power to account

Investigative reporting is how a newspaper keeps a promise: that people who hold power will have to answer for what they do with it.

We go into the records. We ask who knew, who decided, and who was left to live with the result. That has meant staying with a Love Canal family after the state refused to reopen a neighborhood investigation; asking, on the day Goodyear shut its Niagara Falls chemical plant, who will check what it leaves behind; and putting a school district’s own cash warning on the record.

Accountability journalism is not a performance. It is the habit of going back, of naming institutions, and of publishing what we can verify — even when it is inconvenient for the people in charge.

Your subscription

What you get — and what it supports

A subscription to The Buffalo Chronicle gives you:

• Unlimited access to our reporting, beyond the preview every reader gets
• Access to Opinion and to Buffalo’s Finest, which are reserved for subscribers
• A direct way to support original reporting in Buffalo and Western New York

You can read the first two paragraphs of each story without paying, and you can open three stories a month for free. A free account unlocks a few more. A paid subscription removes the limit, and it keeps this newsroom independent.