More proof -as if necessary- that the Miami Herald and Sen. Bill Nelson are closer than ever to hitting the iceberg like the Titanic...

More proof -as if necessary- that the Miami Herald and Sen. Bill Nelson are closer than ever to hitting the iceberg like the Titanic...

Miami Herald

Corrections & Clarifications

Posted on Wednesday, 10.19.11

A story on a wake in Cuba for dissident Laura Pollán, which appeared on Page 10A in Tuesday’s Miami Herald, included the wrong party designation for Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

Not mentioned -who at the state's largest newspaper wrote the story with the wrong information: Juan O. Tamayo.

And since he's with El Nuevo Herald, and we all know what their reputation for scrupulous fidelity to accuracy and facts are -like Lindsay Lohan's- this surprises whom exactly?

Also not mentioned -the name of the sleeping Herald editors who didn't know that 11-year U.S. Senator Bill Nelson is a Democrat, albeit, NOT the former Cleveland Browns QB of the same name. Nelson's the only statewide-elected Democrat still in office in Florida, a fact that is very likely to end next year. A fact that you'd think at least one editor at the largest newspaper in the fourth-largest state in the country should have noticed.

Yes, some of you may recognize that name, as Tamayo is the same exact guy who, more often than you'd think made sense, curiously, gets front page coverage of his pieces in the Sunday Herald's laughable excuse of a public policy section called Issues & Ideas.

The very section of the newspaper that rarely if ever contains a single use of the word "Broward" in an editorial, column or essay written by a Herald employee, or Guest Op-ed author.

But which often has 3-4 separate things about a country called Cuba.

In case you have somehow missed it when I've mentioned it before here on the blog, under the current news management leadership put in place here by McClatchy Company, the Herald often goes many, many months in a row without EVER mentioning the name of the South Florida county where 40-45% of their own readers live in that particular "section" of the newspaper, which used to be six pages and which many months ago shrank to four pages.

And four feeble pages at that!

In fact, Tamayo had a piece this past Sunday on Broward Commissioner Sue Gunzburger's upcoming trip to Brazil as part of FL Gov. Rick Scott's trade mission..

Well, actually he and the Herald didn't write about that, though they should have.

(Comm. Gunzburger leaves this coming weekend for about five days or so, minus two days of travel since flight is over 8 hours long.)

Per usual, Tamayo wrote about something involving Cuba that I'm quite sure that 95% of the Herald readers waking up Sunday morning couldn't have cared less about -the Archbishop of Havana.

And the word "Broward" did NOT appear anywhere in that section on Sunday.

Just like the week before and... but there were THREE separate pieces about Cuba on Sunday in their four feeble pages.

The Herald makes no secret of wanting to cover Cuba infinitely better than it does Broward County... and does, often writing about Cuba in the State & Local section so much that you wonder why they continue the pretense at all.

Why won't the Herald bite-the-bullet and print a separate section that's focused on Cuba and Latin America news for those readers in South Florida who can't get enough of that, and then, correspondingly, actually run MORE articles about Broward in the local news section?

Perhaps because they suspect that given how the Herald has foolishly force-fed Cuba-related articles down Herald readers' throats for years, given a choice, English-language readers will overwhelmingly ignore a new Latin-oriented section and the ads contained therein.

But if they do, wouldn't beleaguered readers have ample reason for doing so?

Yes, which is part of why Herald management has to whistle-past-the-graveyard and can't publicly acknowledge that chronic over-reach of theirs.

Trust me, I've spoken to many Herald employees the past eight years since returning to the area from Washington, D.C., and almost every time this topic comes up, they confide that they personally believe that fear of readers ignoring their flood of Cuba & Latin America stories in a separate section is part of the reason why the Herald does things in such a ham-handed way and crams Cuba stories into the local news section rather than Section A.

You know, the local section section, the one that for YEARS didn't have a single story about the mis-adventures in democracy and governance at Hallandale Beach City Hall or even show up for HB City Commission meetings?

(And by "ignore" it, I mean just like I and so many others ignore their awful Living Today section that's so often full of dim-witted stories about diets and the celebs who love them and chick-lit style self-empowerment pieces that are ludicrous to read.

That section is 180 degrees from the way the Washington Post's famous and popular "Style" section I got used to reading every day for 15 years is edited and focused like a laser-beam on what Washingtonians want to know more about.

It's not like night and day, it IS night and day! )

As I've mentioned here in the past two weeks, the evidence is overwhelming that while McClatchy and Herald management have no qualms about letting Herald columnist and Editorial Board member Myriam Marquez and columnist Fabiola Santiago -see my photo above from Wednesday's "An example to inspire the Cuban people"- keep writing about Cuba in a section that purports to be about news re Florida and South Florida, they have ZERO interest in hiring someone to be a columnist that opines largely about Broward County issues, trends and personalities for the 40-45% of the area that lives there.

If they wanted to, they would have.

They haven't.

They take us completely for granted!

As I said in that Oct. 3rd blog post of mine about Marco Rubio that happened to mention Marquez and her complete disinterest in anything north of the county line the past 39 months,

Marco Rubio vs. Univision - An attempted political smear FINALLY awakens the Miami Herald to Univision's thread-bare claim to journalism. Finalmente!

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/marco-rubio-vs-univision-attempted.html

living in Broward County in the year 2011 is to know that the Miami Herald has no interest in writing about the world you and your family and friends live in, even while constantly telling you about people you've never heard of who live in another country hundreds and hundreds of miles away.

And yet, the Herald continues to impart a sense of importance to these other people's lives that's completely out of proportion to the reality of its readers, while ignoring Broward county and municipal elected officials mis-adventures and poor decision-making here that DO affect our daily lives.

And not surprisingly, the logical consequence is that failing to see their world accurately and fairly reflected in the largest area newspaper in South Florida, more and more well-educated and well-informed people in Broward County who were once readers have completely stopped reading the Miami Herald... and seeing the advertising that appears in it.

It's dead to them.

Iceberg dead ahead!

Miami Herald grave robbers at it again! Herald's threadbare Broward homepage runs 15-day old story as Breaking News to fill-up space!

Miami Herald vending machine in front of Denny's restaurant, Hallandale Beach, FL.
July 3, 2011 photo by South Beach Hoosier


Miami Herald grave robbers at it again!
Herald's threadbare Broward homepage runs 15-day old story as Breaking News to fill-up space!


Shades of 'The Donald Misdirection,' wherein the Miami Herald intentionally ran a weeks-old story about Donald Trump's consideration of a presidential run as "Breaking News" on their Broward homepage, sometimes as one of Top Three stories in all of Broward County, WEEKS after the story first appeared online, and, yes, WEEKS after he formally announced he would NOT run.


It didn't matter, though, the Herald desperately wanted eyeballs, so there that story stayed, day-and-night, day-after-day, week-after-week. Who needs editors!


I wrote about this subject the first time on May 16th in a post titled, Answer: It's about Donald Trump. Question: Why is a month-old story still on Miami Herald's Broward homepage under 'Breaking News'? Blame Jay Ducassi, http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/answer-its-about-donald-trump-question.html.


I then followed-up on May 18th due to continued grave robbing of old stories with a post titled, Donald Trump Redux is further proof of the Miami Herald's gross incompetency and fundamentally-flawed idea of (and coverage of) Broward County in 2011.

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/donald-trump-redux-is-further-proof-of.html

That the Herald is so oblivious to both reality and public perceptions, and continue to do such a piss-poor job of covering Broward County issues, personalities and trends in an intelligent fashion, not to mention, local government, that they have to resort to running old stories to fill-up the space that ought to be more properly filled with CURRENT stories on those subjects, tells you plenty about journalism as practiced by McClatchy's Miami Herald under publisher David Landsburg and executive editor Aminda "Mindy" Marques in the year 2011.


What do you call the anti-Pulitzer Prize?

Screenshot I captured this morning of Miami Herald's Broward homepage.

Do you see the link for the last story under Breaking News in the left-hand column?

Police: Woman’s body found in Hollywood pool

It's 15 days old!

Posted on Tuesday, 07.05.11

Police: Woman’s body found in Hollywood pool

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/07/05/2299894/police-womans-body-found-in-hollywood.html

Donald Trump Redux is further proof of the Miami Herald's gross incompetency and fundamentally-flawed idea of (and coverage of) Broward County in 2011

So, would you believe that more than:

a.) 36 hours after Donald Trump announced that he wasn't running for president, and,

b.) the day AFTER the Miami Herald ran a print story on page 3A -with no photo- to that effect, and,

c.) after I commented here in this space on Monday the 16th that the Herald's management had continually kept a link to an April 13th story about Trump in the "Breaking News" section of the Broward homepage -to the exclusion of actual recent stories in this county-titled, Answer: It's about Donald Trump. Question: Why is a month-old story still on Miami Herald's Broward homepage under 'Breaking News'? Blame Jay Ducassi

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/answer-its-about-donald-trump-question.html

early this morning, after I woke-up due to some noise outside my home (and after flipping the computer back) on, I discovered that

d.) this same, now completely useless story, had now migrated from number four on Monday to... yes, being the number-one Breaking News story in Broward County in the opinion of Herald management/staff?

At the top of this post is the photo proof of the current McClatchy/Herald crew's gross incompetency and their fundamentally-flawed idea of (and coverage of) Broward County, a large county in the nation's fourth-largest state, yet treating it like a pariah in terra incognita.

STILL.

It's a screenshot I took of the Herald's Broward County homepage at 1:58 a.m.

It speaks volumes for the Miami Herald's future.

"Iceberg dead ahead!!!"

As predicted here, McClatchy & Miami Herald never refer to illegal alien status of convicted killer of Chandra Levy in article. Shocker!

In this space on Friday, February 11th, in a blog post I titled, "Killer convicted! Illegal immigrant from El Salvador sentenced to 60 years in prison by D.C. jury for 2001 murder of Chandra Levy" http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/killer-convicted-illegal-immigrant-from.html 
I posited the deeply-felt personal belief that within days, when the time came for the Miami Herald to finally run their story on the verdict of this murder trial, they would completely ignore the fact that the convicted killer of Chandra Levy, Ingmar Guandique, was an El Salvadoran who was in the United States illegally.
And, in fact, Guandique had been here illegally for YEARS.

As you can see from my snapshot of that article as it appeared in print, above, and the actual article, below, my prediction went from my brain and lips to the Miami Herald's printing press.

That I could predict such a thing with such utter confidence ought to give you some real insight into the extent which the traditional Chinese Wall between editorial and reporting is a non-existent one at the Miami Herald on the issue of immigration policy.

They don't even bother trying to pretend anymore and hide their bias.

The real kicker is that the McClatchy reporter, Michael Doyle, actually used the word "immigrant" in his version of the story.
"Immigrant?"
"Immigrant," really?


Knute Rockne was an immigrant. Albert Einstein was an immigrant. Lou Gehrig and Martin Scorsese's family were immigrants.
Ingmar Guandique is an illegal alien who stone-cold murdered an innocent woman named Chandra Levy, a 24-year old young woman with an outgoing personality who continually gave to her community in her hometown, and was killed because to Guandique, she was just a loose-end to his latest crime.
Period!

Guadique is a person with a very long criminal record that this Herald article, as it actually appeared in print, hardly even begins to skim the surface of. The Washington Post reported on that criminal record in detail years ago, but but for whatever reasons, the Herald has NEVER ever mentioned it.

Tell me, why would the Miami Herald censor his long criminal background for so long?
And why was he STILL here?
Those are good questions, why don't you call illegal alien advocate Chery Little, founder and executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, and ask her?

There's clearly someone up in the Washington, D.C. area doing the same thing for the illegals up there that she does in Miami, where she has serially manipulated the hell out of the pliant South Florida news media, especially the Miami Herald.

Little limits information on the carefully-chosen 'clients' she trots out for the news media
and keeps the illegal alien parents -who came here and ignored U.S. govt. notices to return home or update information- completely out of the reach of reporters.
All in order to get the most positive spin possible for herself, FIAC and the issue.

If you have paid close attention to her and her dog-and-pony shows for the local South Florida media thru the years, it's hard not to notice that her 'clients' are almost always straight out of Central Casting, and that's not by mistake.And did you ever notice how few of the Hispanic 'clients' are dark-skinned?
I have!
And so have many of my friends throughout South Florida.


That was especially noticeable when she was trying to rally public support for the absurd and unpopular DREAM ACT that the vast majority of Americans have always opposed.
The people she trotted out were almost invariably articulate high school kids getting very good grades with lots of potential and lots of options, as if that was at all representative of what most of the kids here in South Florida illegally have.
It's completely preposterous.
But the South Florida news media ate it up, anyway!

That's not by accident, since it's clear that Little carefully chose which people to trot out for all the predictable questions from the sleepwalking media, many of whom seem more like aspiring spokesmodels than journalists.

And because so many of the local Miami print and TV reporters lack much backbone to speak of, much less, a nose for real news, especially the ones under the age of 35, they swallow it whole every time, never bothering to ask how someone -a culpable parent- NEVER quite learned enough English in 17 years in Miami to make themselves understood in English, even while their kid might be getting straight-A's.
(Now there's THE real story -the reality disconnect and the media's perpetual lack of curiosity.)

And almost every time Cheryl Little's name appears in print in the Herald, who's the (faux) reporter doing the stenography?
Correct, Alfonso Chardy, the most self-evidently biased reporter at the Miami Herald -or just about any newspaper I can think of, actually.

If you ever wondered about the inherent and over-weaning bias of the Miami Herald and their parent company, The McClatchy Company, on the issue of immigration policy, I think this story is the final nail in the coffin.
Game, set, match.

If Carlos Alvarez or Dwyane Wade or Don Shula were killed in a robbery or drive-by outside of a Shula's Steakhouse by an illegal alien, would the Miami Herald mention that pertinent fact, or would they intentionally keep it out?
I guess we know the answer to that question now, as this snapshot I took, above, of Saturday's Miami Herald, page 4A -with no photos, no links, no nothing...- makes abundantly clear.
Or read it yourself!

For the record, the text in blue in the article below NEVER appeared in yesterday's print edition.

-----

Chandra Levy's killer gets 60-year prison sentence

By Michael Doyle

McClatchy Newspapers

The man convicted of killing Chandra Levy was sentenced Friday to 60 years in prison.
Punctuating a law-and-order saga that's lasted nearly a decade, D.C. Superior Court Judge Gerald I. Fisher rejected a defense bid for a new trial and imposed the stiff sentence on Salvadoran immigrant Ingmar Guandique.
"I think he is a dangerous person," Fisher said. "I think he is a dangerous person to women, in particular, and I think he will remain one for a long time."
Chandra's mother, Susan Levy, drove the point home, with a firmly delivered victim's impact statement that she directed, at times, right at Guandique.
"You, Mr. Guandique, you are lower than a cockroach," Levy said.
At the end of her 16-minute statement, in which she also read comments written by her son, Adam, and her husband, Robert, Levy turned to her daughter's killer and pointed at him.
"Finally, (expletive) you," Susan Levy said. "That is it."
Now 29, Guandique will be at least 80 before he becomes eligible for parole from federal prison. Fisher rejected prosecutors' request to deny any possibility of parole, raising the faint possibility that Guandique will die outside of prison.
"This might be a life sentence," Fisher acknowledged. "In all likelihood, it will be a life sentence."
Manacled and dressed in an orange jumpsuit, Guandique showed little emotion during most of the 90-minute sentencing hearing. When given a chance to speak, though, he appeared to rub tears from his eyes before protesting his innocence.
"I am sorry, I am very sorry for what happened to (Chandra)," Guandique said, speaking through an interpreter, "but I had nothing to do with it. I am innocent."
Following a little more than three days of deliberations, the jury of three men and nine women on Nov. 22 had found Guandique guilty on two counts of first-degree felony murder.
The jury concluded Guandique had attacked Chandra on May 1, 2001, while she was walking or jogging in a remote reach of Washington's Rock Creek Park. The felony murder charge was formally predicated on a claim that Guandique was attempting to rob Levy, although prosecutors emphasized the possibility that the attack was sexual in nature.
Citing prison disciplinary records and other crimes, including several Guandique admitted to and others that were never proven in court, prosecutors had argued he was an implacable menace to society.
"Guandique has demonstrated predatory behavior that seems incapable of rehabilitation," Assistant U.S. Attorneys Amanda Haines and Fernando Campoamor-Sanchez wrote in an 18-page sentencing memo.

Defense attorneys Santha Sonenberg and Maria Hawilo retorted with their own sentencing memo of more than 11 pages, in which they cited a violent, impoverished upbringing as well as learning and psychological problems.

"He grew up without running water or electricity ... and he suffers from a number of different afflictions," Sonenberg said.

A former defense attorney, appointed to the D.C. Superior Court bench by President Bill Clinton in 2001, Fisher had also overseen preliminary proceedings in the Levy case for more than a year before the trial began.

Levy had just turned 24 when she disappeared. She had finished her University of Southern California graduate studies and a federal Bureau of Prisons internship and was planning to take a May 5 Amtrak train back home to California's San Joaquin Valley, trial testimony revealed.

Levy was also sexually involved with then-Congressman Gary Condit, trial evidence and testimony graphically confirmed. Early speculation about her shadowy relationship with the much-older politician had helped make Levy's disappearance a news sensation in the first place.

An uncomfortable-looking Condit testified that he had nothing to do with Levy's death, but the judge also permitted him to stiff-arm questions about the exact nature of his affair with Levy.

Prosecutors lacked any DNA, fingerprint, fiber or other physical evidence connecting Guandique to Levy or the wooded Rock Creek Park hillside where her skeletal remains were found in May 2002. There were no eyewitnesses.

Prosecutors also didn't get a chance to cross-examine Guandique, who listened to the translated trial proceedings through a headset.

Of the 40 prosecution witnesses, only former Fresno Bulldogs gang member Alberto Morales directly connected Guandique to Levy. A one-time cellmate, Morales testified that Guandique confessed the killing to him.

Morales, currently scheduled to be released in 2016, is not currently in federal Bureau of Prisons custody, according to the agency's inmate locator. During the Levy trial, he was said to be "in transit." It is not yet known which federal prison Guandique will be dispatched to; previously, he was serving his sentence on other charges at U.S. Penitentiary Victorville, on the unforgivably hot margins of California's Mojave Desert.

Meanwhile this very afternoon, the St. Petersburg Times, a newspaper owned by the New York Times Company, has a story on their website, highlighted in blue below, titled, "Illegal immigrant held in connection with standoff in Carrollwood."
http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/illegal-immigrant-held-in-connection-with-standoff-in-carrollwood/1151437

Yes, even the St. Pete Times, a very liberal newspaper that employs reporters I personally know, DOESN'T engage in such ham-handed and selective use of facts -much less, in a murder case!- to the extent that McClatchy and the Miami Herald has -and does.


"Illegal immigrant held in connection with standoff in Carrollwood."
http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/illegal-immigrant-held-in-connection-with-standoff-in-carrollwood/1151437

How a video of Paramore in Stockholm & Razorlight in London proves the Miami Herald is too damn slow. Iceberg dead ahead!

Paramore -Misguided Ghosts, LIVE in Stockholm, acoustic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9OuNtlXiGA

How a video of Paramore in Stockholm and Razorlight at the Cuckoo Club, London proves the Miami Herald is moving too damn slow in its news coverage.
Iceberg dead ahead!

A number of months ago -I want to say it was mid-April- when I wanted to prove a few points about how poorly the Miami Herald was serving their increasingly smaller number of subscribers and readers -esp. the Sports Dept., led by their editor, Jorge Rojas- part of my grand plan was to run photos of what they ran in the newspaper on Saturday and compare that to what other East Coast newspapers ran that same day, since it's the same time zone.

The point, obviously, was to skewer the Herald once again thru some easily-understood and
rather self-evident anecdotal evidence to demonstrate that their conscious decision to send copies of the newspaper to next door Broward County where I live -in my case, right next to Aventura, only 14 miles due north of the newspaper's HQ on Biscayne Bay in Miami- which contained old news, lots of Wire stories and less local locally-written stories with important context, was only making their well-known problems MUCH WORSE

This is most easily demonstrated when you don't see complete sports stories and scores the next day -or timely election result updates on the website.

Some examples of this from this past year:

Wednesday, November 3, 2010
The Miami Herald's dismal Pony Express-style coverage of The World Series -compared to the New York Times- is a bad omen for readers
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/miami-heralds-dismal-pony-express-style.html

Thursday, September 2, 2010
Breaking: Miami Herald & sports editor Jorge Rojas already in mid-season form as they ignore BigTenNetwork's televised ballgames
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/breaking-miami-herald-sports-editor.html

Saturday, August 28, 2010
Miami Herald is channeling Pony Express in its reporting on Broward School Board elections from four days ago. But it's the year 2010!
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/miami-herald-is-channeling-pony-express.html

Saturday, April 24, 2010
UCLA edges Sooners to win 2010 NCAA Women's Gymnastics Championship at Gainesville; Coverage of Women's Sports in the Miami Herald
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/ucla-edges-sooners-to-win-2010-ncaa.html

Monday, January 4, 2010
A TV program we can use more of over here: "Jag ska bli stjärna"; Girls sports in South Florida and the abysmal media coverage of it

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/tv-program-we-can-use-more-of-over-here.html

As you can see from above, in the interim, I've run a few pieces here and there demonstrating that central uncontested fact about the Herald's declining quality to a fair-thee-well, using both the coverage of the second NCAA D1 Womens Basketball Semifinal game, and Game Two of the 2010 World Series, Texas Rangers at San Francisco Giants, the latter of which started before 8:30 p.m. Eastern.

At the time, the other part of my plan was to show that despite all the technological innovations of the past 15 years that allow legacy media companies like McClatchy's Miami Herald, as well as bloggers like myself, to share and post information quickly, the Herald was "moving kinda slow" -like Uncle Joe in front of the Shady Rest Hotel in Petticoat Junction- to the absolute detriment of everyone concerned, most notably, news consumers.

One of the ways that I was going to do that was to post a great video of Paramore performing in Stockholm late on a Friday night/early Saturday morning, that had been recorded and posted to YouTube, and which later in the early A.M., was sent to me by a friend in Stockholm who'd been at the concert, and was so wired that she literally couldn't immediately fall asleep.

Naturally, like millions of other people, unable to fall asleep, she promptly started checking her email and surfing the Web.

In her version of the story, after reading my humble blog here for the first time in a few days, and sending me a note about some things she liked and some constructive suggestions, intent on going to sleep but wanting to check one last time, she typed in Paramore on YouTube, assuming that it was unlikely that anyone at the concert had uploaded something yet.

But she was wrong.
Somebody had!

At the top of this blog post is a better quality version of the original video that I saw, but you still get the point nonetheless.
Technology and social media allow news, ideas and information to flow freely from all sorts of places.
So why is the Herald so laggard at doing the basics, like timely reporting?

Why are they consciously turning their back on covering local government in South Florida and losing what precious remaining credibility they maintain?

When I woke up that Saturday morning in April, the newspaper lacked what I and many other news junkies or sports fans would consider some basic information, yet my email inbox was ALREADY full of interesting news, including that hours-old video that was still PIPING FRESH!

Since I didn't post that back then when I was of a mind to, I'll do it now, and further buttress my point by posting here yet another video that proves the point.

Blogger extraordinaire Josefina Boston of AbsolutBoston blog fame, and Escada's London HQ, http://absolutboston.se/ shot some interesting video when she and her beautiful model pal Tess Montgomery went over to the Cuckoo Club in Mayfair.
That is, they did so after they and two other fashion-forward friends hit the opening of the new Dior store on Bond Street, where the champagne was really flowing.
http://absolutboston.se/dior-opening-party/

While there for the Cuckoo Club's second anniversary, Josefina filmed this performance by Razorlight from very close-up.



Razorlight playing LIVE at The Cuckoo Club, Mayfair, London
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCCWY_xL33w

Josefina blogs for the very popular Spotlife blogging platform, http://spotlife.se/ as does the lovely Tess Montgomery, who, in my opinion, looks like a taller, sexier Julie Delpy.
http://www.motmodel.com/models/detail.asp?model_id=3991

Not that there's anything wrong with the regular-sized one! http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000365/

Tess blogs from http://tessm.se/, where she has even more photos of Razorlight performing at http://tessm.se/cuckoo-club-2-ar/ as well as some photos of the Dior event at http://tessm.se/dior-event-pa-bond-street/
Bon Chic, Bon Genre!

Tess even has some good sound advice that's especially practical at this time of the year when she says at one point in her post, "Jag har nämligen som regel att aldrig blanda shopping och alkohol."
Which is to say that she's developed a rule about never mixing shopping with alcohol.

That's clearly a lesson that's yet to take hold of many area women, since I often see them over at the Aventura Mall around 6:30 p.m.or so, as they go straight from drinking with their gal pals to shopping, usually over at Nordstrom's.
http://about.nordstrom.com/MapPoint/MapResults.aspx?bizid=774

I can't help but think that Tess probably has a good story behind that rule, too, just like Jethro Gibbs of longtime Hallandale Beach Blog fave NCIS has for his rules.
http://ncis.wikia.com/wiki/Leroy_Jethro_Gibbs/Rules

So, getting back to the Herald, I know when I look at the Saturday newspaper tomorrow and it's ponderous website that is both too-busy and yet NOT full enough of legitimate news stories, I will see so-called "news" that's largely been pre-chewed or eaten with all the turkey leftovers on Friday, on what is traditionally one of the worst weekends for news stories because the varsity news team is away on vacation.

When specifically is Miami Herald publisher David Landsberg finally going to publicly share with Herald readers what his actual plan is to rescue the newspaper, and make it relevant to readers and news consumers, which it increasingly is NOT by any stretch of the imagination?

It's getting kind of late in the voyage with Landsberg at the helm, and while I'm no expert on icebergs, I can see with my own eyes that the known and unknown icebergs keep getting closer and closer to the Herald's bow as it steers into unchartered waters without a compass or, seemingly, a legitimate plan to get to its destination.

And like you all, I know with absolute certainty that most of an iceberg is unseen -and below the surface.
Just like the Herald's myriad problems.
But some problems are too big to hide.

-----


Paramore: Sweden Photoshoot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbKIFZY3q9M

Paramore - New Music - More Music Videos

Paramore - Decode, Ulalume Festival
http://www.mtv.com/videos/?id=1623823

More Paramore interviews and goodies at
http://www.mtv.com/music/artist/paramore/artist.jhtml

Paramore's official website: http://www.paramore.net/


See also: http://stureplan.se/bloggar

A day in the life of McClatchy's Miami Herald, as viewed by a reader who's largely given up on them fixing their problems, or surviving long-term

Above, November 12, 2010 photo by South Beach Hoosier of a Miami Herald vending machine on U.S.-1/S. Federal Highway in Hallandale Beach, Florida.

UPDATED 11/13/10

I guess I hardly need mention to anyone living in South Florida that the prices posted on this vending machine haven't been accurate for quite some time, but then the Miami Herald management's foolish insistence in the recent past that only charging Broward readers a quarter, while already charging fifty cents in Miami-Dade, would get them more readers and eyeballs on their ads, never made any sense either, though from a distance, it might've sounded good in theory.
Say from Sacramento, Calif., the home of McClatchy Company, which owns the Herald.

Even their own reporters and columnists knew this, as prior to their finally charging the same amount in both counties, it would've been rare for any phone conversation I had with a Herald reporter or columnist to end without them bringing the subject up, which told me in no uncertain terms that it was clearly a sore subject.

For the better part of the 14 years I lived in suburban Washington, D.C., in Arlington, VA, and caught the Metro train into downtown Washington for work during the week, whether from the Clarendon Metro station or the Ballston station, I happily paid fifty cents for the Baltimore Sun from a vending machine on my way down into the station -since the 1990's- while paying less for the Washington Post, because it was a very smart, well-written and well-edited newspaper.

The Sun, a newspaper I first read as a kid in North Miami Beach while growing-up a devout Orioles fan, is not what it once was, owing to a lot of curious moves made by parent Tribune Company, but on any given day, it's still usually much better than the Herald and the Tribune-owned Sun-Sentinel combined, and was well worth the price.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/

People in South Florida, especially serious people, will always be willing to pay more for quality, but they want to see it first.
That quality they seek is seldom if ever seen in the current version of the Miami Herald.

So what's the plan for the Herald's future, if any?

Exactly.

Back on September 18th, I emailed the following thoughts of mine, most of which were written while once again exasperated by what kind of product the Herald was producing.

I sent it to a couple of dozen or so of the usual well-informed, media-centric folks I know in Florida and around the country who get my observations before I usually share them here with you all later in the day, often after getting insightful comments, corrections or head's ups from them about related (or worse) MSM screw-ups closer to them geographically.

In light of what I wrote here on November 3rd about the Herald's truly dreadful coverage of the recent Giants-Rangers World Series, that is, their mentioning NOTHING about Game 2 the following day, on a Friday morning, while the South Florida edition of the New York Times, printed up in Deerfield Beach, 25 miles north of me, had a page-and-a-half of stories and columns, plus nice photos and box score info.

The Miami Herald's dismal Pony Express-style coverage of The World Series -compared to the New York Times- is a bad omen for readers
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/miami-heralds-dismal-pony-express-style.html

The following email is also in that vein, and all came together one particularly frustrating day about nine weeks ago, when I was checking the Herald's website for some information and noticed something quite troubling, which was not good news for either Herald readers or serious-minded people in South Florida who continue to ponder this simple question:
What's going on at One Herald Plaza?

-----

The Miami Herald's staff finally smells the coffee.
But is it too late?

Back on Sept. 1st, I sent an email to Edward Schumacher-Matos, the Herald's Ombudsman (the one without either a blog or a weekly column, but rather some once-in-a-while thing) because that was the day where an armed intrusion took place at the Discovery Channel HQ in suburban D.C. -a Maryland building I've been in dozens of times- yet it took the Herald hours to put something about it online.

This, even while a nice but not great photo of actress January Jones of Mad Men fame remained online just below the masthead for hours, while nothing about the story up in Silver Spring, being shown on LIVE TV for hours on the cablenets, was there.

It was just the latest in a VERY long line of jaw-dropping and galling editorial and content decisions at the Herald in the recent past that befuddle the Herald's dwindling number of readers.

In fact, I was so dismayed that I actually wrote Hallandale Beach Blog fave, Alan D. Mutter, creator of Reflections of a Newsosaur blog fame, and mentioned here often,
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/ and asked him -only half-jokingly- if there was any chance that one of his savvy Venture Capital friends in Silicon Valley might want to reinvent themselves, and play the role of a media mogul, and perhaps take the Herald off of McClatchy's hands?

I even told him, "Trust me, the concerned and conscientious people in South Florida would've be very much indebted!"

Sadly, Alan replied that he didn't know of such a person.
But then I presumed that such a person even exists, oui?

-----

Date: Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 4:52 PM

Subject: Surprise! Takes over THREE HOURS for Herald website to mention hostage drama at Discovery Channel HQ in Silver Spring. Sleeping on the job, Just like Herald's Broward coverage!

To: Edward Schumacher-Matos

September 1st, 2010
4 pm

Dear Mr. Schumacher-Matos:

Nothing in this email is about the Herald's spotty coverage of Broward County in general or Hallandale Beach, and to a less degree, of Hollywood, in particular.
The paper's unsatisfactory coverage of them is what is is.
Reality.

Did you know that there are media sites overseas that have had something about this hostage story for a while now, yet the Herald has nothing almost three hours later but STILL has prime space at the top for

Kardashians

New fashion collection

They're cute girls and all and I get their appeal, but why has the paper completely
OD'd on them?
Seriously..

You should have one of the Herald's interns check and see how many times in the past six months there hasn't been something about them in the Herald.

Or how many times, since she was hired two years ago, Myriam Marquez has written anything at all about something going on in Broward County or of particular interest to readers there.

Trust me, it won't be pretty.
In fact, it will be grim.

Consider that your Sunday public policy section, Issues & Ideas, did not have the word "Broward" in it anywhere.
Or any story or column about some issue, personality or idea of particular relevance in Broward
Again.
For at least the second week in a row.

Do you know how many times THAT fact pattern has been true this year?
I did, I really did, but I stopped counting because it was so disturbing.
And pathetic.

The other day, in reference to the glacial and practically non-existent coverage of the Broward School Board races last Tuesday, and their lack of updates online, I compared the Herald's pace to the Pony Express on my blog.
In retrospect, I might've been exaggerating, but not quite in the way you might imagine.

In a day or so, I'm going to show that a careful analysis of Herald stories since last year's approval of the Marlins Stadium by the M-D County Commission, 5 of the 9 commissioners who approved it never had a story written about them in the ensuing 14 months that ever said anything at all about them and their vote on the stadium's financing, or any possible second-guessing or doubts from constituents.
ZERO.

That explains a lot.
Like why the paper was beaten soundly by a website on the stadium financing story due to a leak.

If someone with that info had tried to give the info to the Herald, unless they immediately got savvy reporters Matthew Haggman and Charles Rabin on the phone, unlikely, do you know what the Herald reporters and editors would've said or done?
Nothing.

The same response that Herald readers in South Florida routinely get from reporters and editors, like Beth Reinhard, Jay Ducassi and dozens of others when they contact them.

Those Herald employees first response is to call other people rather than call you back or return your emails about solid news you know or possess, even when you have photos that corroborate everything you say.

I know this first-hand and so do many other people I know who closely follow what goes on in Broward County and South Florida.

And guess what, the Herald daily shows that lack of context or understanding of the area they purport to cover, which is why so many readers constantly complain that the Herald's local news and govt. stories have an unusually high degree of fact and context problems, and are usually more notable for what is left out, often the most important aspect of why something happened -or didn't.

But unless you are there in person, like I am so often, you wouldn't know anything about it.

Seriously, when are we going to see the positive changes the Herald needs to make it viable and engaged?
What's the plan?

Not the silly one that got in print a few months ago, but a real plan that actually benefits readers who want real news?

The Herald's current plan of ignoring news because it's not in Coral Gables, Doral, Miami or Miami Beach is NOT working and is repelling readers from both the physical paper and the website, for reasons like why I wrote this in the first place: sleeping on the job!

From my perspective, the ship is still listing and there are NO ships around to rescue any survivors, if any.

I will leave to another day the confounding situation with reporter Alfonso Chardy and why his disingenuous professional behavior is allowed to continue apace, like nobody really noticed what he did a few weeks ago, blatantly lying to Herald readers in a news story.
But notice we did.

Not just me, but full-time print and TV reporters from around the state.
I know that because they contacted me to tell me they noticed, too.
And those are facts.

(About an hour later, after some website magic happened, I added.)

P.S. Congrats! It only took over three hours and continuous coverage on the TV cablenets for someone at the Herald to finally post something online. I can only imagine how things will be in the future when some blogger scoops the Herald that Fidel Castro is dead.

------

Well, as you might imagine, despite having exchanged cordial emails with him in the past, I never heard back from the Ombudsman, whose email address I have since deleted from my computer, since really, what's the point?

If the Herald's current and recent management care so little about their own readers that Schumacher-Matos lacks the tools or frequency he needs to be taken seriously by Herald readers, the sorts of things other large newspapers provide -and the facts clearly show they do- why continue to kid myself and think my emails to him will accomplish anything other than temporarily venting some of my dismay?

Which is why many of the past emails I've penned to him over the years but never actually sent, keeping in DRAFT instead, will be now be revisited here on the blog when similar situations occur in the future at the newspaper, as they inevitably will, since the Herald keeps making the same mistakes over-and-over.
They won't stop digging the hole they're in.

To use an image that I've often used here in the past, their behavior is akin to a dog chasing-its- tail -initially amusing, but ultimately, fruitless and irritating.
Like many current network TV programs.

I forgot to mention above in my prologue that in my second email to my media-centric pals, friends and acquaintances here in Florida and around the country, I also sent them a link to Bob Norman's spot-on Daily Pulp post of Sept. 17th about the greatly rising frustration level of the Herald's own employees.

It's so good, I have it here and urge you to read the entire thing, including the reader comments, whose frustration with the newspaper and its management is clear .

BrowardPalmBeach NewTimes
Herald Reporters to Management: Stop Mimicking Twitter and Focus on Serious Journalism

By Bob Norman
Friday, September 17 2010 @ 5:57PM

The following letter appeared yesterday on the Miami Herald's internal memo board, Readme. Signed by numerous veteran reporters and editors, it was posted the same day 49 more layoffs were announced at the depleted newspaper.

-----------

Sept 2010
OUR HOPES FOR A BETTER HERALD:

So, it's Saturday night, and you want to hear live music. Among your choices: going to the Hard Rock Cafe to hear Shakira (or Seal or Ringo Starr or Reba McIntyre); or going to a bar with an open mike. At the Hard Rock, you'll hear a polished, professional artist.
At open mike night, you'll probably hear people with day jobs singing Sweet Caroline ... perhaps lustily, probably off key.

Nothing intrinsically wrong with that open mike bar. But we'll bet most people, with
the ability to choose, would go hear the pro.

The Miami Herald, we would argue, is becoming the newspaper equivalent of open mike night. Or a flea market.

Read the rest of the post at:
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2010/09/miami_herald_reporters.php

There are 177 reader comments!

See also McClatchy Watch on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/McClatchyWatch

McClatchy Watch website, while defunct since before last Christmas, is still online:
http://cancelthebee.blogspot.com/