The news, according to The News, is not good.

By JOHN F. BONFATTI

The first negotiating session between the newspaper and the Buffalo Newspaper Guild-CWA, whose collective bargaining agreement expires July 31, was highlighted by a collection of low lights presented by The News bargaining team.

In an apparent attempt to deflect attention away from the paper's own remarkable profits, members of the News' team took turns narrating an hour-long slide show of economic horror stories, complete with cartoon renditions of tombstones.

The tombstones, inscribed with the names of local businesses no longer in operation, were shown to illustrate how the shrinking local economy has left The News with fewer potential advertisers.

It's a point that would have been more persuasive had The News not gone to ham-handed extremes: three pages of headstones that listed such long-defunct businesses as Sattlers and Twin Fair.

News President Warren T. Colville lamented the arrival of superstores like Wal-Mart and the Home Depot that put so many small, local advertisers out of business. The national superstore chains eschew the News' pricey run-of-the-paper advertising for cheaper pre-printed supplements.

"Competition is good," Colville said, which reminded some on the Guild side of the table of one noticeable absence from The News' graveyard of doomed Buffalo businesses: the Courier-Express.

Colville said he wished he had "some things to tell you that were real positive," yet The News presentation glossed over the biggest positive news for any company: healthy profits.

The fact that The News, in what Colville called "difficult times," is expected to show a $46 million profit last year, was presented in the context that the paper's profits are flat over the past decade.

Left unsaid is the fact that those profits remain so far above the national average that The News' money-making prowess is the envy of the vast majority of newspapers in the country.

At the second negotiating session on January 10, the two sides exchanged proposals. The Guild's priorities, as indicated in a poll of the membership, are a wage increase and improvements in pension and dental benefits.

The Guild has also proposed provisions for using sick days to care for ill children and dependent adults, making Martin Luther King Day a paid holiday, adding a sixth floating holiday, improving the Classified Advertising incentive program and higher differentials for newsroom employees who work nights and weekends.

As it did in the last negotiations, The News is asking for a provision assuring that management retains the sole right to operate its enterprise as it sees fit, something Guild chief negotiator Jim Schaufenbil called "Draconian."

In addition to seeking "relief" from health insurance costs, The News is also seeking to "modify" benefits for part-time employees and create a new class of District Managers for those hired under the new contract.