Everything Happening in the 716,
and the People Behind It.

What 716 Spotlight Is

716 Spotlight covers Western New York — the 716 — in three ways: a regional events calendar, local news and original reporting on the businesses and families who built the area, and a co-op postcard that puts local businesses in their neighbors’ mailboxes. All of it is free to read. None of it is behind a login.

What’s Happening

Western New York had no single place to find out what was happening. Every venue, theatre, library and museum kept its own calendar, and no two of them agreed. So we built one calendar for the whole region.

Twice a day it is rebuilt from 23 local sources — venue and theatre calendars, public libraries, museums, the City of Buffalo listings and the regional ticketing feeds. Duplicates are matched and collapsed, so a concert carried by both the venue and a ticket seller appears once. At any given time it holds 2,542 upcoming events across 30 Western New York towns and cities, and every listing links back to the venue it came from.

Listings are free. Nobody pays to appear, and anyone running something — a church supper, a fundraiser, a band, a cleanup — can add it themselves.

The News and the Stories

Behind the storefronts of Western New York are families who have been doing this for three, four, even five generations. A twelve-year-old dishwasher who grew up to buy the restaurant. A family cooking in the same kitchen for eighty years. A bootlegging empire run off the Niagara River. Some of it has been written down before. Most of it has not.

We research and publish those stories — business histories, local landmarks, and the 716’s own past — so they are still findable by the people who come next.

And we cover what is happening now. The Bills and the Sabres through a season. A new stadium going up and an old one coming down. A development changing the shape of a town. A public health question like the radiation testing on Grand Island, written so a neighbor can actually understand what it means for them. If it matters here and somebody needs it explained plainly, it is a story for us.

More than fifty pieces are published and the archive grows every week.

The Postcard

Advertising that works for a small local business is hard to buy. The co-op postcard exists to fix that: an oversized full-color card that local businesses share the cost of, so each one reaches thousands of households none of them could afford to reach alone. Half of Grand Island receives it one month and the other half the next, which puts it in front of all 9,572 island addresses six times a year.

Only one business per category appears on any card, so an advertiser never shares the page with a competitor. The Tonawandas are next.

One Thing Worth Saying Plainly

A business does not have to advertise with us for us to tell its story. Some of the businesses covered here are co-op partners. Plenty are not, and never have been. No business has ever been asked to buy anything before being written about, and none ever will be.

The co-op is not a money-maker. It is a group of local businesses splitting printing and postage. It pays for the card. It does not buy anybody a story.

If a story is worth telling, we tell it. That is the whole point.

Where We Cover

The events calendar and the stories cover the whole 716, from Buffalo and the Northtowns out to Niagara Falls, Lockport and the Southtowns. The postcard mails on Grand Island today, with North Tonawanda, the City of Tonawanda and Kenmore next.

Know a story that should be told? Tell us about it, or email news@716spotlight.com.