I was planning on following-up some of my previous letters to Herald Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal and mention some of these points, since it seems clear that many of the changes already undertaken, in my opinion, are fundamentally flawed and are not long for this world.
Still, the current economic/advertising problems present Anders Gyllenhaal with a a real opportunity down here to skip a few steps and make the Herald much better long-term quicker.
That is, if he is willing to seize the opportunity, but the problem is that neither I nor anyone else knows how much time and leeway his bosses at McClatchy are willing to give him now to do the necessary re-structuring to make the paper both profitable and increasingly relevant, following the recent changes he oversaw in the print edition and the newly re-designed Herald website, the latter of which I've been criticizing for years for many reasons I've enumerated here.
(Meanwhile, three years ago in the CJR: Anders Gyllenhaal On A Big Redesign, ‘Lost’ Readers, and Finding New Ones http://www.cjr.org/the_water_cooler/anders_gyllenhaal_on_a_big_red.php )
As I've expressed here previously, I really do believe that Gyllenhaal is sincere and really wants the paper to be MUCH better than it currently is, and in some ways, may actually be the best person to help make that a reality.
But I also know that regardless of what's said, he has but a finite amount of time to make some changes, before big changes from corporate at Sacramento that nobody wants will happen, and by then, the time for tweaking and customer input and listening to constructive criticism will be long gone. http://www.mcclatchy.com/And yes, at that point, the horse will have left the barn 'cause the demolition team is already at the door with their invoice order, ready to say buh-bye to Broward County and its readers.
It's been nice knowing ya, but we're going to "re-focus" big time and become a Miami-Dade centric media organization.
See ya at the Dolphins game!
No more time for surgery with a scalpel, here come the drill-hammers and the wrecking ball.
And unlike the melodramatic, over-reported management refusals by Times publisher Jeffrey Johnson and editor Dean Baquet to make Tribune-ordered layoffs at the LA Times,
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/henry_weinstein_on_what_great.php there will be no symbolic but ultimately Pyrrhic victories along Biscayne Bay, with dozens of protestors marching in the hot sun. Instead it will be but a whimper.
There'll be plenty of video of people with their office belongings and tsockes in boxes walking to their cars, just like after the Enron implosion and hundreds of other scenes we've seen before, and the folks interviewed will likely be more articulate than most, but at the end of the day, no South Florida union or corporate entity is going to join the fight to keep some reporters at the Miami Herald.
And there certainly won't be an explosion of South Florida bloggers leaping to the defense of the Herald, either.
More likely will be a variation of what Tom Blumer at Bizzyblog said back in 2006:
“If it’s not, the people who run the Tribune Co. have lost control of it, and THEY need to go. Dean P. Baquet and Jeffrey M. Johnson have drawn the line in the sand, and have clearly been in open defiance for several months … He should have resigned by now if he really thought the company was going too far, as should have Mr. Johnson. But they are acting as if their newspaper is some kind of indispensable public utility. The public, which is abandoning them by canceling subscriptions at a net rate of 5 percent or more every six months, clearly doesn’t agree.”
See more of this argument at LA Times Editor’s and Publisher’s Defiance Are Firing Offenses http://www.bizzyblog.com/2006/09/15/la-times-editors-and-publishers-defiance-are-firing-offenses/
And the Herald of Gene Miller will be seem even further in the rear view mirror than ever before.
I must say, based on some of my own recent experiences attending some civic events and government functions in both Broward and Miami-Dade where the Herald had reporters in attendance, I'm dumbfounded that what was actually reported in the paper so completely failed to capture the moment and portent of what was happening.
Sadly, this has been far from a rare occurrence since I returned here from the D.C. area a few years ago, and only makes more obvious the fact that one of my biggest personal regrets has to be my not listening to my DC friends' suggestion that I start a blog when I first had the chance to.
Then, I could've hit the ground running here and could've chronicled the myriad daily mis-steps that I found so damn confounding in the pages of the Herald, so that others would know about them as soon as I did.
This was before I was first made aware of Henry Gomez's Herald Watch http://heraldwatch.blogspot.com/
(Not that this failure to rise to the occasion is limited to just the Herald, as the Sun-Sentinel and local TV stations have an awful lot to apologize for as well, given their scanty coverage of some newsworthy events I've been present at the past year.
They will all get their due in a forthcoming post taking them to account with pinpoint accuracy.)
Given the insufficient local news coverage, I can't help but feel that the most important changes are yet to come, and just like longstanding problems in a dysfunctional family, they are the very ones that will be put off 'till the very brutal end.
So with that on my mind, I checked my other email and just read Alan's D. Mutter's latest spot-on post at his excellent blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, subtitled, "Musings (and occasional urgent warnings) of a veteran media executive, who fears our news-gathering companies are stumbling to extinction."
His post from yesterday, titled Youth-inized ChiTrib jolts core readers had a lot of resonance for me for reasons that will soon be apparent.
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2008/10/youth-inized-chitrib-jolts-core-readers.html
Not that it's a defense, per se, to the exact situation he describes and deplores, and the associated issue of the relative quality of newspapers on Saturday, but when I lived in Chicago/Evanston and in Washington, other than maybe a nice surprising profile in the Washington Post's renown Style section about someone in the news you always sorta wondered about, and the Op-Ed area, the Chicago Tribune and the WaPo absolutely sucked on Saturdays.
It's a chicken and egg argument: do Saturday newspapers suck because the powers that be there know that regular readers don't read the paper on Saturdays, or do readers forgo it because it sucks?
Of course, the WaPo runs 3 pages of Op-Ed and Letters to the Editor on Saturdays and I hardly need remind you that the quality of "Letters" there compared to the ones in the Herald is literally "Night and Day" as Hoosier native Cole Porter would've put it.
I'd spend ten minutes reading the dozens of Letters they'd run on that third page, an entire page, with many clearly written by very smart people who knew what they were talking about, even if I disagreed with the policy prescriptions they were prescribing.
And yet the Herald runs the most banal blatherings imaginable on their Letters page, people commenting on something they heard someone say to their friend's hair stylist or whatnot about John McCain and whether he was 'really tortured.'
What????????
My God, it's jaw-droppingly bad editing on an epic scale, and such a squandering of resources.
But then the rest of the Saturday WaPo, especially in the summer when the big names were out flacking their books and other ventures, was usually like the JV newspaper.
Sorta the newspaper equivalent of the local Miami 6 PM newscast on Saturdays, where, somewhat improbably, 30% of the time the top story is weather -even if it really isn't.
When in doubt, lead with weather!
You'd see names you'd never heard of before and there'd either be an equal amount of really well-done pieces with grace and insight and simply awful ones, except in the sports section.
Most of my friends -again, my friends, the target demo of their advertisers- didn't read it on Saturday unless their boss on Capitol Hill or K Street or their trade association or PAC were being accused of something nefarious. They'd simply ask me if there was anything good in it.
Maybe part of that is due to the fact that unlike here, at the end of the world, stuck between the Atlantic and the Everglades, so many people in DC takeoff early on Saturday mornings for day trips, out to Charlottesville or to Culpepper or any of a million small Virginia towns that offer both history AND quaintness, plus, great breakfasts with flaky biscuits at reasonably-priced restaurants where the service is both prompt and friendly -unlike here.
(Biscuits as once made by a certain place in Davie named Beets Country restaurant in the early-mid 70's, complete with working hitching post for horses out front. Biscuits so good that your head would explode!
And my family & friends would drive from North Miami Beach to devour with breakfast.
I'm sure there's a nondescript office building there now.)
Then again, maybe they're headed to the nearby mountains of West Virginia to go kayaking, or up to Annapolis to be around the water to escape the sweltering summer heat if they didn't have a place in Rehobeth or Dewey Beach.
Or leave for Baltimore early to see some sights like Fells Point or Fort McHenry again before the Orioles game at 7 PM.
Those are all things that I did hundreds of times on Saturdays over the years, but I always made sure I had the WaPo with me before getting into the car with my friends.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that part of the problem with Saturday newspapers, at least as I observed it, is the dominant role of the Redskins to the Washington, D.C. area on Fall Sundays, as is equally true with the Bears in Chicagoland.
(I watched the Dolphins' 1985 MNF win over the undefeated Bears and the Bears mauling of the Patriots in the Super Bowl wearing my aqua Dolphins cap at the Norris Student Union at Northwestern with my friends at Medill and Kellogg, the very same place I watched the Shuttle Challenger disaster live from the very beginning on ABC-TV.)
Even a longtime Dolphin fan like me who had season tickets as a kid for the first time during the '72 Perfect Season, had to follow the Redskins and watch their games in order to fit in, otherwise you're a complete non-entity. Really.
It was simply inconceivable to people I knew in D.C. and Chicago and the so-called collar counties that you wouldn't either be at the game or watching it on TV, which mirrors my own attitude when I was at IU.
I had a huge circle of friends and acquaintances, yet didn't know anyone in Bloomington who didn't at least pretend to follow the fortunes of the team, and looked at those who didn't with more than some suspicion.
If you're going to do anything on the weekend, especially if you don't have kids or family responsibilities, you're going to do it on Saturday mornings and afternoons so you don't get caught late trying to cram it in before the Redskins or Bears game.
That never ever works out well for anyone.
I strongly suspect that most people didn't read the Saturday newspaper even a third as often as I did, but then I've always been a news junkie.
As if you didn't already know!
Congratulations are in order to Herald reporter Larry Lebowitz for being mentioned at the Nieman website for his excellent week-long series on the broken transit promises in Miami-Dade County, especially those involving the Metrorail system, and the more recent broken promises to expand the service northward towards the Broward County line and Dolphin Stadium, as was originally promised to the community that voted for it.
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Showcase.view&showcaseid=0084
I came across that completely by accident recently while looking for something else. As it happens, something I was going to share with Gyllenhaal about problems with superficial news coverage.
In the end, for Gyllenhaal to succeed, he needs to give must-read reporters like Lebowitz and Diana Moskovitz and some others I admire the time and resources they need to their thing -and find more reporters with attitudes similar to theirs.
And start making editors much more accountable for the bad stuff that consistently gets in there without answering basic questions of any story: the 5W's of journalism.
Plus, of course, the consistent biases infavor of certain talking heads or institutions
In the next week or two, I hope to revisit some of the most egregious Herald horror stories, which, for whatever reason, have heretofore escaped their proper level of scrutiny and wrath among either Herald readers or the local South Florida blogging community.
I say that because some of the folks involved are, to my eye at least, serial offenders, and they continue to make the same sorts of mistakes over and over again to this day.
Why the Herald editors let it slide, I don't know, but I sure do notice it.
In an instant!
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