About Steve Cichon
STEVE CICHON is the Founder, Publisher and Editor-In-Chief of staffannouncer.com, a website dedicated to preserving and celebrating Buffalo's pop culture history, with a special emphasis on his love for the history of Buffalo radio and television. He's a historian, journalist, and author who is proud to use those skills to help make Buffalo a more fascinating place to live by uncovering many of the latent stories found seemingly everywhere.
 Under the staffannouncer.com name, Steve published "A Complete History of Parkside," a 174-page paperback chronicling the history of Buffalo's Parkside neighborhood from its time as a spot sacred to the Haudenosaunee Indian tribes right up to the present, culminating 5 years of writing and research.
Now News Director for WBEN Radio, since 2003, Steve has been an award winning news anchor and reporter for WBEN. He's reported on many of the big stories effecting Western New Yorkers, including The Erie County Budget Crisis, spent 10 days in New Orleans (starting 2 days after Hurricane Katrina struck), The October 2006 Ice Storm, and The Crash of Flight 3407.
Steve's proud to be looked at as a 'Buffalo Guy,' and takes pride in tackling stories from a Buffalo angle; stories with particular interest to Western New Yorkers. In writing about him, The Buffalo News called Steve 'a true Buffalonian. He knows this town.'
As a journalist, Steve is the winner of over a dozen individual and group Associated Press Awards, for excellence in radio journalism, best news series, best feature, and general excellence in use of medium.
Through his work in media, a non-profit volunteer, and his work with staffannouncer.com, Steve has been proudly recognized as a Business First as a 40 Under Forty recipient (2010), and an Am-Pol Eagle Person of the Year (2009), and when Western New York Public Broadcasting produced a documentary about the history of radio and television in Buffalo, one of the first calls made was to Steve, who was interviewed at length for the project, and lent hundreds of archival materials which were used heavily thought the broadcast.
Steve has a deeply rooted interest in maintaining Western New York as his home. All 8 of his great-grandparents called Buffalo home, and so shall he. He lives in city's Parkside neighborhood with his wife, Monica.
Steve Cichon: A Business Card History:
Producer,
WBEN Radio: 1993-98 |
Producer,
WIVB-TV: 1997-2000 |
Program Director, Producer
WNSA Radio: 2000-2003 |
Anchor/Reporter,
WBEN Radio: 2003-present |
| About staffannouncer.com
Dedicated to the preservation and celebration of Buffalo's pop culture history, and reuniting Western New York with its memories, Steve Cichon's staffannouncer.com has been years in the making.
The website itself actually signed on in 2004. But for decades leading up to that date, Steve had been combing newspapers, used book stores, flea markets, Salvation Army Thrift stores, and even the occasional dumpster for the ephemeral "stuff" of Buffalo's pop culture history.
Fueled by stories of the way 'things used to be' from grandparents, older friends and co-workers, and especially his dad; Steve set out to collect and share the remnants of days gone by.
The whole point of staffannouncer.com is to celebrate on the web the amazingly uncelebrated. That is... fill the holes on the internet. If you remember a TV show or a radio personality from days gone by, you should be able to get it with a quick google search. Too much of Buffalo's collective pop culture identity was nowhere to be found when this website signed on. So many of the things that were a part of my childhood... our childhood.... came up "No Matches Found."
So now, I'm proud to say, many of those searches wind up here at staffannouncer.com.
Because of who I am and what I do, much of the focus here is on Buffalo's radio and television past. There is nothing more rewarding than reuniting someone with her late father's voice, or a photo of his brother at a microphone that had hadn't been seen by the family before.
I think of the joy on my dad's face when I showed him a photo of the Shea's Seneca show at the corner of Seneca and Cazenovia. With his glasses off-- one eye closed, and a broad smile on his face; he was catapulted back to a different time and place. For 20 minutes, he soaked in every pixel of the image-- the movie house, the Sears store... He was seeing things not in the photo, like the A&P store, and his grandparents apartment just north of that intersection. I think he felt the nickel in his hand, given to him by his hard-working grandfather... a nickel used to buy enough candy bars to make him feel just a little queasy during the double feature.
I'm sitting on a life-long collection of Buffalo's memories, and I'm working hard to put more and more of it on-line all the time... with the hope that you, like my dad, will find something to take you back to a simpler place, even if only for a moment or two.
I'm also honored that so many folks with stories, sounds, sights, and memories to share.. from the worlds of radio, television, retail, newspaper, photography... come to me to give their work or their family's work to the world. We can often take old recordings or photos, digitize them in high quality for future generations for families, and allow a vast internet family of Buffalo souls to share in them at the same time.
Many of the images, recordings, and ephemeral pieces of Buffalo's Pop Culture history come to staffannouncer.com from folks like you: Fans of the site. If you have something you thing the world would be interested in, drop me an e-mail.
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BUFFALO, NY (staffannouncer.com) - Steve Cichon's staffannouncer.com is an ever-growing on-line Buffalosonian, a collection of the things that make Buffalo and Western New York the special and truly unique place that it is. 
