Jim Heaney

Jim Heaney is editor and executive director of Investigative Post. He was an investigative reporter with The Buffalo News from 1986 to 2011 and a reporter and editor with The Orlando Sentinel from 1980-86. His coverage over the years has focused on economic development, local and state government, politics, education, housing and transportation, and he was an early practitioner of computer-assisted reporting. Heaney has won more than 20 journalism awards and was a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Oct 11

2023

More misdeeds involving Niagara Falls candidate

Guns gone missing and an order to stay away from a former girlfriend are included in the past of Carlton Cain, GOP candidate for Niagara Falls mayor, who once was a top official in the city’s police department. Cain said he doesn’t recall signing an administrative order of protection issued by Acting Police Superintendent Michael Trane in 2019. “I guess if I signed it, it happened,” he said. The woman in question, who was cooperating with an Internal Affairs investigation of Cain, did not return a phone call from Investigative Post. Trane has not responded to an interview request. In[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Oct 9

2023

Further decline at The Buffalo News

The wheels continue to fall off the rickety wagon known as The Buffalo News. In fact, the decline is gaining speed. I’m told the staff has been informed by management that daily print circulation is down to about 35,000. Last time I reported, based on 2022 numbers, it was 56,000. That’s down from a peak of 310,000 in the mid ’90s. Digital subscriptions are another 35,000. (More on that later.) There are a variety of reasons for the precipitous decline in print circulation, starting with changing news consumption habits. Nearly nine in 10 Americans get their news from digital platforms;[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Oct 8

2023

Monday Morning Read

Subscribe to WeeklyPost, our weekly email newsletter. Below is just of the half of what you’ll get in your inbox every Sunday morning. Health policies in red states are contributing to higher premature death rates among its citizens, The Washington Post reports. To help make its point, The Post compared data from three neighboring counties in New York (Chautauqua), Pennsylvania and Ohio. Reported The Post: State lawmakers gained autonomy over how to spend federal safety net dollars following Republican President Ronald Reagan’s push to empower the states in the 1980s. Those investments began to diverge sharply along red and blue lines,[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Oct 6

2023

Misconduct allegations against ‘Falls mayoral candidate

Carlton Cain, the Republican candidate for mayor of Niagara Falls, was investigated at least twice on charges of misconduct while serving on the city’s police force before retiring in 2019. Charges that are a matter of public record include his efforts to retrieve his stolen police weapon and allegations that he removed files on him compiled by the department’s Internal Affairs unit. Cain, in an interview with Investigative Post, denied removing his Internal Affairs records. The department’s investigation of the allegation reached no conclusion. He was docked three days pay involving the gun incident. A third matter involved a woman[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Oct 1

2023

Monday Morning Read

Subscribe to WeeklyPost and you’ll get a complete newsletter every Sunday. Buffalo is on the Canadian border. (Duh). The way things are going, Canada is going to get slammed by climate change, Maclean’s magazine reports. By the 2070s we will be living in a fundamentally different climate than the one our country was built for. Cities across the country will begin to reach “climate departure”: a symbolic rubicon, after which a climate falls completely outside historical norms. Even the coldest year, going forward, will be hotter than the hottest in the past. What does that say about our prospects, sitting right[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Sep 25

2023

Appellate court reinstates OTB ‘whistleblower’ lawsuit

A federal appeals court has overturned a lower court’s decision and reinstated a lawsuit filed by a former executive of the Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp. who claimed he was fired after he agreed to cooperate with state and federal investigators who were examining the inner-workings of the organization. In a ruling issued Monday, U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals determined that U.S. District Court Judge William Skretny erred in his October decision to dismiss as untimely the lawsuit filed by former OTB Chief Operating Officer Michael Nolan. In his earlier ruling, Skretny determined that Nolan’s claims of First Amendment[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Sep 17

2023

Monday Morning Read

Get WeeklyPost delivered to your inbox Sundays by subscribing here. Below is part of what you could have read yesterday. Did Terry Pegula really say Black players should go back to Africa if they don’t like things here? It depends who you ask. Related: I spotted a Tweet the other day that pictured a half-dozen Bills players taking a knee prior to a game a few seasons back. None of the players remain on the team. Hmmmmm. OK, the efforts by a former girlfriend to embarrass Mark Poloncarz look suspect. But it’s not a good look for the county attorney to discourage[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Sep 10

2023

Monday Morning Read

Subscribe to WeeklyPost and get a leg up on Jim Heaney’s take on what’s in the news. For whatever reason, political reporters at The Buffalo News keep treating Chris Grant of Big Dog Strategies with a lot more respect than he deserves. I mean, Grant and his company employ the type of election tactics that give politics a bad name, often works for toxic candidates, including George Santos, and often spins without regard for the facts. Grant should be treated as a pariah, not a sage. Yet The News based a story Sunday in large part on his analysis that[...]

Posted 2 years ago