Showing posts with label Miami News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Miami News. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Heartbreaking! Pedro Gomez dead at 58. A grievous loss to his family, devout Major League Baseball fans who truly care about history and context, and to the Miami/South Florida that he grew up in, knew, loved, and, like us, could get SO very vexed by.



@ESPNPR
ESPN remembers SportsCenter reporter Pedro Gomez, who passed away unexpectedly today at the age of 58. http://es.pn/3q0mK3Q

@BillyCorben
Heartbreaking news. One of the country's best baseball journalists, but always repped Miami. Alum of Coral Park High, Miami-Dade Community College and University of Miami. Thinking of Pedro's wife Sandra, their boys Rio and Dante, and daughter Sierra tonight. #RIP mi amigo.

@hbbtruth
Yes, heartbreaking. As someone who grew up in #SoFL and left #Miami to find great success + universal respect, Pedro was the antithesis of all the know-it-all media types (we hate) who've been claiming to know Miami since the 1960's. He knew what OUR history/reality was bec he lived it.

@hbbtruth
.@JeffPassan provides us w/video that's #PedroGomez in a Nutshell. Growing up in #SoFL w/friends w/relatives who'd been imprisoned by Castro, yet STILL talked longingly abt returning to a free #Cuba every time I saw them, well, his words are spot-on.

@JeffPassan
This is from Pedro’s trip to Cuba in 2016. If you want to know who he was, just watch this video. He loved his family, his heritage, baseball. He was just full of love for everyone.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This is from Pedro’s trip to Cuba in 2016. If you want to know who he was, just watch this video. He loved his family, his heritage, baseball. He was just full of love for everyone. <a href="https://t.co/zc6oFACPMo">pic.twitter.com/zc6oFACPMo</a></p>&mdash; Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) <a href="https://twitter.com/JeffPassan/status/1358628370150535169?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 8, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I'll be adding to this post about Pedro Gomez over the next day or so as more anecdotes and thoughts come to mind and get better clarified in my head, so that I don't write all the things I'm currently thinking and feeling right now, so please come back to this post every so often this week to get caught up and possibly find out some things you may not have known.
Seems like I have been hearing his enthusiastic, positive voice coming out of a TV or a radio forever.
And now, no more.

Dave

Monday, April 18, 2016

South Florida Journalism in 2016: The ever-expanding gulf between what the South Florida press corps offers up and the quality, local-centric news coverage the South Florida public craves, has never been as large as now; Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets in her final NY Times Public Editor column that hits out against elite/institutional bias

South Florida Journalism in 2016: The ever-expanding gulf between what the South Florida press corps offers up and the quality, local-centric news coverage the South Florida public craves, has never been as large as now; Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets in her final NY Times Public Editor column that hits out against elite/institutional bias
Revised April 21, 2016 at 3:15 p.m.

As most of you longtime readers of Hallandale Beach Blog know well by now -but which you newer readers don't, especially those of you who have only discovered me the past two years via my tweets @hbbtruth- I started this blog in 2007, largely out of a fit of frustration and anger at the self-evident failure and lack of individual/collective effort I saw on a daily basis by the South Florida news media. Specifically, its collective failure to evolve from what it once was -home to nationally-respected who were in some cases some of the best and most-dogged investigative news sleuths in the country.
It's why so many of them eventually wound up at the then-three national U.S. TV networks and the fledgling CNN when that cablenet debuted.

My complaint, summed-up, was that the South Florida's press corps' failed to build upon this track record, and failed to expand its level of news coverage of public policy and local government in ways that readers/viewers clearly wanted to see and rather expected.

Though I was born in San Antonio, Texas a few years before, my family arrived in Miami from Memphis when I was seven years old in the Summer of 1968, the day after Miami Dolphins #1 Draft pick Larry Csonka of Syracuse signed with the Dolphins.
As everyone who knows me then or now can tell you, I have been a devout news, sports and public affairs junkie ever since then.
But the difference between then and now is that when I was growing-up in South Florida in the '70's, there was an All-News AM radio station, WINZ AM 940 that was a CBS News affiliate and provided lots of news reportes to new York, especially those covering weather, immigration and the Sapce Shuttle.

That has NOT been the case in several decades, nor has there been even one attempt by anyone to lay the groundwork for a Local News Cable channel of the sort that has existed in many media markets throughout thsi country, including some smaller than South Florida's.

Why has COMCAST, long the dominant cable provider in South Florida, utterly failed to deliver on that potential? Well, you know who never asks?
The South Florida news media themselves, including the Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
If you want to waste an hour, try going thru their newspaper archives and try to find a single story about the subject in the past 20 years.
That's the sort of media area South Florida is.

That's made worse because with my crazy accurate memory, I've been able to recall  at the drop of a hat the names of individual reporters and anchors at local TV/radio stations and reporters and editors at the Miami Herald and the late Miami News -that I spent so much time at as a High School student- and the individual beats their reporters covered and owned .
And the important news stories they broke or gave much-needed historical context to when it really mattered to residents of South Florida, NOT after-the-fact months later in some investigative piece clearly designed to win journalism awards, NOT keep South Florida properly informed.

I still have an institutional memory of what those people were able to do with much less in the way of resources and technology than the current crew of South Florida journalists have and take for granted, for whatever reasons.
That doesn't just rankle, it makes me cringe, because so much of what I regularly consume from local South Florida media isn't just parochial but even shallower than the above ground swimming pools that once seemed to dominate South Florida and North Miami Beach in the 1970's.

And that means that getting to the heart of some of the endemic and unique problems of South Florida, much less their possible solutions, are one day farther away than they need to be for our community's long-term sake.

Over the past nine years that I have been writing this blog, a recurring theme here has been the cleavage between what the South Florida news media believes is perfectly acceptable in terms of effort and end product for news consumers, and what the public wants and expects from them. 

A graph where X never meets Y.

Over the years, the insufficient level of individual and collective effort expended by the South Florida press corps and the dominant English-language news outlets has only gnawed away at me and other well-informed observers I know and trust, as we are continually see both individual reporter bias, institutional lack of historical knowledge and lack of torpedo every well-intentioned effort to make local South Florida residents better informed about their community and the state that is now the third-largest in the country.

We see the growing gap between what the public expects from print/TV reporters and columnists and TV Assignment Editors and News Directors, in the form of interesting and compelling ways to cover local news, and what is actually presented to us as readers and viewers, as the very seeds for our area's growing technology and information gap.
A growing class and income chasm that won't be made smaller by simply pretending that it doesn't exist.

These same national trends are regularly and correctly decried in Washington as harmful to the nation's future and economic vitality when presented calmly as facts by politicians of varying political persuasions and august public interest groups with demonstrated track records for being non-partisan, but somehow, closer to home, these same problems are largely ignored when they are pointed out by people like myself and other public observers in South Florida who want this community to be MUCH BETTER than it is,.
Even when we use self-evident facts and the news media's own track record as our opening and closing arguments.

It's not exactly a secret that compared to the rest of the country, South Florida's relative youth historically -the City of Miami not being founded until 1897- and large and ever-growing population of Northeastern and Midwestern transplants whose history and allegiances remain elsewhere years after they've moved here, has always worked against the long-term interests of South Florida institutions, civic groups and foundations, even ones who profess laudable societal goals and do try to show some spirit and verve.

But this also means these groups are NOT front-of-mind and front-and-center when it comes to focusing the community's attention on problems the way similar groups are elsewhere in the country.
It's not an excuse, merely a reflection of history and common knowledge, borne of experience living in and growing-up in South Florida.
But at some point, these same groups current unwillingness to point out the problems at hand and suggesting tangible solutions, has to be called out, and I will be doing just that in a future post with some energy and enthusiasm that I know will surprise and anger many with its ferocity and focus.

So be it!

My blog has never been interested in carrying the water for South Florida's elites or well-off.
#disrupt

But as it concerns today's theme of journalistic lack of effort in South Florida, it's hard to shake the notion that many of these civic groups ansd foundations, so dependent upon the South Florida news media for positive attention and charity dollars when they can get it, seem to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy denying self-evident problem in large part  because of whose oxen may well need to be gored. (Or is it a case of being afraid to bite the hand that feeds them?) 
The South Florida news media's.

To me and many of the people I regularly speak with and confide in here in South Florida and throughout the Sunshine State -even many reporters, editors, columnists and TV anchors whose names are known instantly to many of you- the gulf in South Florida between what is possible in local journalism because of advances in technology that make it easier than ever to report accurately and in real-time, has, unfortunately, never seemed so large as at it does at present.

This is made all the worse by what takes place everyday with the two largest South Florida-based daily newspapers, McClatchy's Miami Herald and the Tribune Company's South Florida Sun-Sentinel, both of whom are and have been going in the wrong direction from readers desires for far too many years.


Since the majority of my focus on this blog, despite my 1,001 other interests and passions, has always been what is happening in South Florida -for good or for bad and why- I write to day to share some much-needed wisdom from a trusted source I have long depended upon, even while never mentioning her previously: Margaret Sullivan, the departing New York Times Public Editor.
At the end of her term as the the Reader's Ombudsman, just as was true throughout when she never hesitated to challenge long-established Times icons and the Times' often counter-intuitive ways of thinking about the larger public interest, Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets.

As I have remarked here many times in the past with fact-filled blog post and copies of letters to the Miami Herald's management, the Herald never replaced their Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, after he left for NPR. And they consciously ignored many of the common sense suggestions he made about journalists.

That includes his April 25, 2010 column, Reporter-columnists tread fine line with readers' trust about the need for journalists to publicly come out to readers as one one thing or the other, i.e. not being both reporter AND columnist, because of the damage that such dual roles can cause to perceived bias and credibility with readers.

The Herald ignored that advice when it came to dealing with both Beth Reinhard and later, Marc CaputoIf you want a copy of that column, just write me and ask for a copy.
It's not been available at the Herald's website for many years.

To see how indifferent the Herald's management was to reader perceptions of bias or unfairness, take a poke at my blog post from May 21 of 2012 titled, 
"What's going on at the Miami Herald? More than a year after the last one fled, the Herald still lacks an Ombudsman -and shows no sign of getting one- to represent readers deep concerns about bias, misrepresentation and flackery on behalf of South Florida's powerful & privileged at the Herald. And that's just one of many unresolved problems there..." 

See also, among many others to choose from:

11/12/10 - 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
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/day-in-life-of-mcclatchys-miami-herald.html

12/21/11- 
For another consistently lousy year of journalism at the Miami Herald, esp. covering Broward County, more lumps of coal in the Christmas stocking of One Herald Plaza -Part 1

8/13/13 - Former Miami Herald Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos -whose position at the Herald remains unfilled 27 months later by McClatchy execs- as NPR's Ombudsman, lays the wood into NPR's Laura Sullivan & Amy Walters for a 2011 investigation re foster care in South Dakota, which officials there took umbrage with, and for good reason it seems. “My finding is that the series was deeply flawed and should not have been aired as it was”

I hasten to add that this was also during the McClatchy era when the Herald ran a multi-weeks old story about Donald Trump in the "Breaking News" section of the Herald's Broward homepage on Monday December 19th, 2011 at 11:21 p.m.
And there it stayed for days...
Really. :-(

Margaret Sullivan's final column from last Friday is a column of pure gold, for it has much that the South Florida press corps could and SHOULD learn from in the way of perceived reporter/editorial/institutional bias, attention to accuracy and willingness to publicly admit mistakes.

I highly commend it to you and ask you to consider sharing it with others you know in South Florida and throughout the Sunshine State who think as I (we) do -that South Florida and the rest of the state would be much better off with a fully-engaged and curious press corps year-round, not the one we have had for years that habitually takes a Summer slumber or vacation come mid-June, never to be seen again until after Labor Day, no matter how important the story.

New study by "the American Press Institute - almost no one trusts the media. The report found that just six percent of Americans have a great amount of confidence in the press.  To put that into perspective, the API ‘s study showed that Americans trust only Congress less than the media. Other organizations that the public has more confidence in than journalists: banks, organized religion, the Supreme Court, and the military.  The number one reason people mistrust the media is that they found reports one-sided or biased. Following closely behind was that readers found something factually inaccurate. Interestingly, respondents to the API report said that how a media outlet responds to inaccurate reports is extremely important.  “Several focus group participants said they do not expect news sources to be perfect and how a source reacts to errors can actually build trust,” stated the report. “Several people said that owning up to mistakes and drawing attention to errors or mistakes can show consumers that a source is accountable and dedicated to getting it right in the long term.” 
On the heels of this not-at-all surprising survey comes this great rear-view column from Sullivan, soon-to-be the Washington Post's new media columnist.




New York Times
The Public Editor's Journal - Margaret Sullivan  
Five Things I Won’t Miss at The Times — and Seven I Will  By Margaret Sullivan 
April 15, 2016 10:00 am 
April 15, 2016 10:00 am
While preparing to leave the public editor’s office and move to Washington, I’ve been getting together in recent weeks with some people I’ve met while living in New York. One was Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, who asked me over lunch what columns I planned to do before I left. I tossed it back to him, asking what he would like to read, and he suggested I take up “what I love and what I hate about The New York Times.”
This guy’s definitely got a future as an editor! I decided to tweak his idea, with a nod to Nora Ephron’s list from her book, “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections.” (Of all the people I wish I had been able to meet in New York, she tops the list.)
Read the rest of her great post at:
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/five-things-i-wont-miss-at-the-times-and-seven-i-will/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body&_r=1

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Florida is still showbiz 'terra incognita' just like 1970's: Conan O'Brian ignoring Sunshine State for upcoming comedy tour; Jon Marlowe, influential rock critic and confidant

Geography as entertainment destiny?
South Florida as unknown land?
It's déjà vu all over again.

Today's edition of The Wrap this morning carries the news that we all could have predicted almost
from the moment we first heard that Conan O'Brien couldn't appear on TV until this Fall as a result of his exit deal with NBC-TV, and would be keeping his name in the news -and polishing his material- thru a nationwide tour.

The Wrap TV Editor Josef Adalian reports that, among other things, the Sunshine State is nowhere
to be found on the itinerary, not even Gainesville or Orlando, which you'd think would be the state default.

The closest venue to South Florida where he's appearing on his Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour is -wait for it -Atlanta.

Atlanta.
Like that's the first time that's ever been the case for something of interest, right?
That's an emphatic no!

It's déjà vu all over again, since that was the case with The Clash's first American tour, Pearl Harbor '79which if I recall correctly, started at the Fox Theater there, as the great Jon Marlowe of the late Miami News was all over that story in a way that no reporter in South Florida today could be.

Just as Jon had been in-the-loop for The Sex Pistols before, during and after their first visit to our shores.
(Or maybe the Fox was where the Sex Pistols first U.S. venue was?)


South Florida kids today take it for granted that a group or entertainer who's hot or topical will perform in South Florida, even if that requires a trip up 95 to Palm Beach.

Back in the '70's, when the only South Florida venue large enough to handle crowds for big acts like Bob Seeger or Fleetwood Mac was the Miami Baseball Stadium, and then, only during certain part of the year, music fans down here who wanted to see LIVE performances had to consistently get in their car and make tracks for Tampa/St. Pete or Orlando.

This latest bit of news reminds me of fun weekend trips with friends in the late '70's and trips never taken because Atlanta was just a bit too far to get back to North Miami Beach Senior High in time for school on Monday morning.

While I was in high school at NMBHS, because I was such a good and reliable source for the Miami News' Sports Dept. in covering high school sports, esp. soccer and gymnastics, I was a frequent visitor to the newspaper, located inside of The Herald Building on Biscayne Blvd., with a killer view of Biscayne Bay and the Venetian Causeway.

There, I soaked up the atmosphere like a sponge, usually not venturing far from the Sports and Entertainment desks.
Sports was manned more often than not by Marty Klinkenberg, Tom Archdeacon and Charlie Nobles, later of the New York Times.

The Entertainment desk was often in the hands of the incredible Jon Marlowe, a South Florida institution who was a very influential national rock critic in our own backyard.

Jon became a sort of musical mentor for me, introducing me to many new and exciting performers I was unfamiliar with, even though I already subscribed to Rolling Stone, reading it cover to cover, as well as New Musical Express.
Performers like Eddie Money and Elvis Costello were among the performers that Jon turned me onto before anyone down here had ever heard of them.

Jon would think nothing(!) of simply calling me up at home at night around 10:45 p.m. on a school night and telling me that he had something in his hands that I "just had to hear."

Then he'd play the record and put the phone next to his speaker -that's how I first heard of a little band called The Clash, long before they were well-known and before their albums and EPs were available in the U.S.

He did something similar one night for Graham Parker on his 1979 "
Squeezing Out Sparks" album before it was released. 

He played one song three times just to be sure that i got every reference! 

There has never been anyone in Miami before or since like Jon Marlowe.


See story on Miami News at bottom.
The Wrap
http://www.thewrap.com/ind-column/coco-go-go-conan-tour-starts-april-15151


Exclusive: Coco A-Go-Go! The Conan Tour Starts April 12


EXCLUSIVE

Conan O'Brien will begin his Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour April 12 in Eugene, Oregon, working his way across the United States and Canada over the course of two months.
Read the rest of the story at:

http://www.thewrap.com/ind-column/coco-go-go-conan-tour-starts-april-15151

Conan O'Brien t
our dates here:
http://www.thewrap.com/column/tv-mojoe


Miami Herald

http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/story/1427188.htmlTHE MIAMI NEWS
Reunion recalls good old days
BY RICHARD DYMOND
January 17, 2010

Richard Dymond, a reporter with The Bradenton Herald, did a tour of duty with The Miami News sports department from 1979-1980.

The Phone Caper Story and many others like it are surely being retold this weekend as 100 or so Miami News staffers gather in Miami for a remarkable, out-of-nowhere reunion -- 21 years after the demise of the spunky afternoon newspaper.

Here's how it goes:

Telephone connections weren't smooth shortly after The News moved its operations from a plant along the Miami River into the bayfront building of The Miami Herald in 1966.

While attempting to call out, News humor columnist John Keasler reached Gene Miller at the rival Herald through a phone operator's mistake. "City desk,'' Miller barked. Keasler recognized the voice. "I was trying to call out,'' he said. "That's OK. You reached City Desk. Tell me the story, and I'll relay it to The Miami News,'' Miller cagily responded.

Hoping to cause havoc, Keasler made up a story: "Twelve dead on the Palmetto. By the Big Curve.'' As he was hanging up, he heard Miller, whose competitive fires would carry him to two Pulitzer Prizes, snap, "What? What? We have to scramble. . . .''

Keasler and Miller are dead, but memories of that keen sense of rivalry are resurfacing as staffers reunite to swap old tales about the The Miami News -- born in 1896, died the last day of 1988.

In its heyday and beyond, The News was a raucous, feet-on-the-desk kind of place, known for its highly competitive poker games (sometimes in the newspaper's conference room), merciless pranks and beer breakfasts after a long shift. It was also famed for its colorful characters, such as the critic who wore leather pants and ballet slippers in the newsroom and the staffer who, kicked out by his wife, set up housekeeping in the back of a hearse.

Back then -- before blogs, Google, Twitter, cellphone cameras and Facebook made everyone a "citizen journalist'' -- reporters woke up with night sweats for fear that the competing paper was out scooping them. Today, with fewer newspapers but a more fragmented news media, a blogger working in his parents' basement could be the one who eats your lunch.

Among News veterans scattered around the globe and many still in the news business, there is a sense of pride at having fought the good fight, taken on a much bigger rival and, most days, held their own.

"We were always the underdog to the mighty Herald, and we played the role to perfection,'' says Pedro Gomez, an ESPN bureau reporter who was a member of The News' sports department under the late Leo Suarez.

"We consistently broke stories and, if you really look at the results, I would say The Herald was at its best when The News was around, because The Herald had to work hard and not get beat by the little stepchild that we were,'' Gomez adds.

Miami News staffers paint a portrait of a passionate newsroom that nurtured distinctive and edgy writing, that remains an important touchstone in their lives, even more so with the passage of time.

DeWitt Smith, on The News' night desk from 1984 to 1986, has worked on 11 newspapers in the last 30 years.

"What made The Miami News different was the esprit de corps,'' Smith says. ``It was palpable, particularly the night desk. The News had a spark to it. The News attracted people who liked the go-get-'em style and lived for that vibration and energy.

Former managing editor Sue Reisinger calls her stint at The News ``the most exciting time of my life. I have never cared so much about a room full of people as I did about those folks.''

Reisinger is one of a handful who labored for The Herald after The News. Another is Mel Frishman, who retired in 2007 as The Herald's Broward news editor.

Frishman's Miami News career began in 1959 when he was 17 and a senior at Miami High. His job, which paid a buck an hour, was taking raw copy off a wire service machine, gluing it to cardboard and shipping it to proofreaders through a pneumatic tube. (This was before electric typewriters, much less computers.)

BRASH HEADLINES
Frishman, who would have six job titles over the years and remained at the paper 'til the end, remembers The News' bold, sometimes sensational headlines -- a counterpoint to the more staid Herald.

"Miami News headlines were meant to grab you and set the tone. We were very picture oriented,'' he said. "We were a liberal light.''

The News attracted many colorful individuals, says reunion co-organizer Mary Martin, a business reporter from 1985 to 1988.

Jon Marlowe was one. He usually wore leather pants, purple blouses and ballet-like slippers that drew stunned looks from the formally dressed competitors riding the elevator with the rock-'n'-roll critic.

"When I hired Jon Marlowe I told him, `If I ever understand anything you are writing, you are fired,' '' says longtime News editor Howard Kleinberg, now 77 and one of the emcees at Saturday night's reunion dinner at Parrot Jungle. Not to worry.

"I never understood a goddamn thing he wrote,'' says Kleinberg, who started as a high-school correspondent in 1949 and joined the staff a year later. "But everyone seemed to love him.''

Keasler was one of the biggest devils in the newsroom. He was once photographed, in formal attire, presenting a rhinoceros with a bottle of bubbly, apparently as part of a sight gag to accompany a column about a new birth at the zoo. Other practical jokers included Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Don Wright and the late photographer Charlie Trainor Sr. They practiced practical trickery on their colleagues -- and each other.

"Wright used to toss his keys onto his desk when he'd come in,'' Reisinger says. "Every few days, when he left the office to go to lunch or even the bathroom, they'd slip an old key onto the key chain. This went on for a week, and his key chain grew immensely heavy with old keys. One day he came in, threw his key chain down on his desk, and was heard to swear because it was so heavy. He exclaimed, "What the hell! I don't even know what some of these keys are for!' ''

He retaliated by tossing confetti all over the photo department, says photographer A.G. (Gary) Montanari. Montanari, who became a court bailiff after The News closed, also remembers that he once caught Trainor putting marbles into the hubcaps of Wright's car.

What's up? Montanari asked. That's to distract Wright, Trainor explained, so the cartoonist won't notice the mullet that had been placed on his engine block.

Another character was the late Milt Sosin, ranked by News editors as the afternoon paper's top reporter.

"Milt had contacts all over the place,'' says David Kraslow, publisher from 1977 to 1988. ``I remember once that no one could find Meyer Lansky, he of Mafia fame. The phone rang on Milt's desk, and a voice said, `Miltie, it's Meyer.' ''

Sosin would score an exclusive interview with Lansky on the mobster's deathbed.

CBS4 anchor Elliott Rodriguez, who was hired as a Miami News reporter in May 1978 one week after graduating from the University of Miami, met Sosin his first day on the job.

"Milt was told to show me around. The first thing he did was show me his Jaguar sports car in the garage. Milt was tall, skinny and had a long neck. He was definitely Felix from The Odd Couple, but he looked more like Oscar. He always wore a sports jacket but hardly ever a tie. He preferred a neckband tucked into his shirt. He smoked a pipe and almost always had one with him.''

Julia Marozzi, who is coming to the reunion from Great Britain, was a neophyte copy editor named Jules Murphy during those heady times.

"All the night owls were a fantastic bunch of misfits and eccentrics who banded together after first edition, occasionally for a slap-up breakfast before heading home to try and get some sleep,'' says Marozzi, who became a high-ranking editor of The Financial Times in London and is now director of lifestyle media for Bentley Motors.

After 1966, The News and The Herald labored under a joint operating agreement in which two newspapers in the same market share business operations while maintaining separate and competitive newsrooms. As the afternoon newspaper, The News was at a distinct disadvantage.

THE LITTLE GUYS
"We were the little guys on the block and had to fight for everything,'' Kleinberg says.

Although this isn't the forum for a symposium on the future of journalism, Martin observes: `The current state of journalism is perilous. Many of our former colleagues have been laid off or are waiting for the next staff cutback or are hoping there will be an early retirement offer. We are all worried about what that means, not just to us, personally, but the quality of news and information available to all of us.

"I think The Miami News reunion is, in part, about honoring a tradition of news gathering that seems to be disappearing fast, to the detriment of all of us.''

The final headline of The Miami News on Dec. 31, 1988:

FAREWELL, MIAMI.

David Kraslow's front-page column ended: ``It hurts when any newspaper with a rich and proud history dies. But this is not just another newspaper. Not to me. And not to this town.''

After the last edition was put to bed, newspaper lingo for finished, the staff opened a case of champagne, and corks popped, recalls Merwin Sigale, now a journalism and mass-communications professor at Miami Dade College.

The champagne was good, but it left a bitter aftertaste.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Miami Herald HQ is now taking in 'boarders'; David Carr on future of newspapers

My comments follow the article. 
---------------------

March 10, 2009

Brown Mackie moves to Miami Herald building

The bayfront headquarters of The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald now also will be home to Brown Mackie College. The Miami media company is leasing more than half its top floor to the private school in a move to generate revenues amid a severe recession.

The college's lease of 51,000 square feet ranks among the biggest downtown Miami office deals this year. The under-construction Met 2 office building announced a 50,000-square-foot lease with accounting and advisory firm Deloitte earlier this year.

The Brown Mackie deal, brokered by Alan Kleber at Cushman & Wakefield and Steven Hurwitz at CREC, is for 10 years. Prices weren't disclosed but said to be in the low $30-a-square-foot range.

Brown Mackie, which has outposts from Tuscon, Ariz., to Akron, Ohio, plans to open at the new location in September. The college offers associate degrees and bachelor's of science degrees in programs such as business management, early childhood education and computer technology. The Miami school has roughly 750 students.

Reader comments at:

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breaking-news/story/943097.html?commentSort=TimeStampAscending&pageNum=1#Comments_Container

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The Miami Herald article above was placed online at 7:45 p.m. Tuesday night, and was sent to me by a reporter friend at the Herald who'd written, "Meet our new neighbors" in the subject header.
Actually, I think they were kind of disappointed that it wasn't at least a hospitality school with cooking facilities, like Johnson & Wales, with one of those faux restaurants,  so the reporters could at least get some good food for cheap, even while serving as guinea pigs.

My own thought, why not a quality bookstore, taking advantage of that great view of Biscayne Bay?
As a kid in high school, I used to spend LOTS of time every month at the late Cox newspaper,
The Miami News, that was in the same building, as part of their JOA, and fortunately for me,
the Sports Dept. and the Entertainment desks were right near the windows with their awesome views.

It may be different now, but back then, the mid-to-late '70's, during powerful summer thunderstorms, 
being near that window meant the thunder sounded THREE times normal volume, and would positively
make you jumpy after a few hours, plus, the view looked like you were watching the end of the world
with ominous clouds right on top of you.

I specifically mention bookstore because as we all learned in November of 2007, per the Miami Book
Fair International held downtown every year, there was not a single general interest bookstore within the City of Miami?  Es verdad!  http://www.miamibookfair.com/
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Miami Herald

SHOPPING: Miami is a bookstore desert - THE HOME OF NEXT WEEK'S FAIR HAS NO

GENERAL-INTEREST BOOK SHOPS

By Andres Viglucci

November 2, 2007

Next weekend, during Miami Book Fair International, the lecture halls
and streets in and around downtown's Miami Dade College will become
the nation's largest bookstore as mobs of readers snap up 70,000 books
from 300,000 titles on display. 

But if you're looking for a comprehensive, general-interest
 bookstore within city boundaries any other time of the year, buena suerte. There is none. 

You read that right: 
Miami , a major city of more than 360,000 people, has not a single such bookstore anywhere. Not downtown. Not in Coconut Grove. Not in the Upper East Side. There is no Borders, no Barnes & Noble, no multilingual independent beyond a smattering of niche stores. 

"Shocking," said Robert Gibbs, a Michigan-based planner and urban retail consultant who has worked all over the country, including 
Miami . "We even have a Borders in downtown Detroit." 

And there isn't much in the offing, apart from a planned independent store in the Grove. The 
city 's two new retail developments -- Midtown Miami and Mary Brickell Village -- have no bookstores and no immediate prospects. 

Certainly, 
Miami has some well-established specialized booksellers -- among others, Lambda Passages, a gay and lesbian bookstore on upper Biscayne Boulebard and Afro-In Books & Things in Liberty City . It also has a few Spanish-language stores, including Libreria Universal, long a beacon for Cuban literary culture and history on Southwest Eighth Street. 

And there are general-interest 
bookstores aplenty in the suburbs -- from chain stores in Aventura and Kendall to the redoubtable independent Books & Books, with branches in Coral Gables, Miami Beach and Bal Harbour. 

So why should it matter that in 
Miami -- with its diverse population, the region's largest employment center downtown, an ostensibly sophisticated international repute, and a recent wave of intense urban redevelopment -- there's zilch? 

Booksellers, book lovers, retailers and planners say 
bookstores function not just as fulcrums of culture, learning and community, but as key ingredients in a successful mercantile mix in urban commercial centers. 

And can 
Miami claim to be a center of arts, culture and commerce without a major bookstore in its city limits? How can a city have a new half-billion-dollar performing arts center but no bookstore ? 

"I would have thought someone would have put a 
bookstore in there somewhere," said Les Standiford, bestselling author and chairman of Florida International University's creative writing program, referring to new development across the city . 

MANY FACTORS 

Why the lack 
of stores? No one is quite sure, but many factors may play a role, including high rents, a large non-English speaking population and the absence of a retail district with foot traffic sufficiently heavy and deep-pocketed to sustain the low-margin business of bookselling. 

The independent Bookworm in the Grove is but a distant memory. More recently, chain stores pulled out 
of Bayside Marketplace downtown and Cocowalk in the Grove. 

"It's tough," said 
Miami Book Fair co-founder Raquel Roque, owner of the tiny Downtown Book Center, which her father opened in 1965 after arriving from Cuba. Though she still carries some English-language books, newspapers and magazines, she said, "we've had to switch to Spanish to survive. It just reflects finances and the population." 

Her store's clientele, she said, is mostly now recently arrived immigrants looking for English-instruction books and bargain novels. She keeps the doors open thanks to a thriving wholesale Spanish-language book distribution business. 

Other Spanish-language 
bookstores in the city also look beyond a local clientele to Web sales. Customers for Libreria Universal's broad stock of Cuba-related books are all over the country, said owner Juan Manuel Salvat. 

The trend is clear, Salvat said: General-interest 
bookstores , especially those trading principally in English, have gone where the biggest concentrations ofbook-buyers are, in well-off enclaves like Pinecrest, Coral Gables and Aventura. 

Census estimates tell part 
of the story. Book-buying is closely linked to education, experts say. In 2006, only 22 percent of adult Miamians had a bachelor's degree. In Coral Gables, it was 58 percent. 

Chain stores in particular have developed location formulas that demand lots 
of well-heeled, well-educated people, said Gibbs, the Michigan consultant: within a five-mile radius, 75,000 people with a bachelor's degree or higher and annual incomes of $75,000 or more. 

They also require several contiguous anchor stores selling clothing and home furnishings, and as many as 10 restaurants, he said. "They can't work by themselves," Gibbs said. "All 
of those retailers reinforce each other." 

But 
Miami has long suffered a shortage of retail of all stripes, from supermarkets to clothing stores. 

That has prompted an effort by 
Miami Mayor Manny Diaz to lure new stores to the city . High on the wish list: a bookstore , said Diaz' retail consultant, John Talmage, CEO of Social Compact, a nonprofit that promotes investment in inner- city areas. 

"It's hard to say you are a literate, knowledge-based community if books are not part 
of the mix," Talmage said. 

The best option for 
Miami , Talmage and others say: independents who can tailor themselves to the local market. 

A COMMUNITY SERVICE 

That's what Felice Dubin hopes to do in Coconut Grove, where giant Borders couldn't make the numbers work. The longtime Groveite and Village Council member and a business partner, Sandy Francis, are installing a 
bookstore in the old Banana Republic space on a prime corner on Grand Avenue . 

Call it a community service, said Dubin, who has no bookselling experience. The 
Bookstore in the Grove will have not only books but a bar serving wine and organic free-trade coffee, unusual gifts, and toys for a targeted clientele of both locals and tourists. 

"We're working every angle," said Dubin, who hopes to open by Thanksgiving. "Everybody is so desperately wanting a 
bookstore that, if we're any good at all, people will come." 

The rest 
of the city will eventually catch up, others say, maybe once downtown's new condo towers fill up. 

"There will be 
bookstores in the city of Miami ," said Books & Books owner, Mitchell Kaplan, who has considered Miami but hasn't found a viable site. "It will have to be something so powerful it becomes a destination by itself. But it's just a matter of when and how."


Alan D. Mutter's Sunday blog posting at his Reflections of Newsosaur site was particularly fantastic and
really had me sighing and laughing, and gave me a lot to think about.
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/  Want to save your local paper? Read this  first 

Mostly, it made me think of all the hours I spent at the IU Library cafeteria on Sunday nights, especially after the last NFL game of the day during the winter, talking and and listening to my friends who were either journalism students at the Ernie Pyle School or on the school newspaper, the ids, or both.

As I've mentioned here before, since we were a pretty well-read crew, on Sundays, most of us had usually polished off the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Chicago Tribune and the Indy Star, so by the time we made it down to the cafeteria, we were like eager Editorial Board members, ready to diagnose and solve most of the problems on campus and in Bloomington -and the NFL- over Cokes, cheeseburgers and slices of pizza.
After we'd done that, some would wax rhapsodic about someday starting a newspaper that would be different and innovative and...
Yes, we were all going to be smart and savvy vertically-integrated media moguls who'd sometimes dabble in sports ownership.
Of course, I didn't know Marc Cuban back then.

Alan's Sunday post clearly shows what happens when people with good intentions get into the newspaper biz... It literally takes over their lives and their finances and affects everything they do, good and bad..

Another interesting perspective on what's happened to local news coverage is this one from Gary Imhoff, editor of the feisty DC Watch, on the coverage in Washington, D.C. since I left the area, and from DC Watch contributor Jason Lee-Bakke on what happens when a powerful-but-useless DC pol threatens a tiny neighborhood newspaper that reports/exposes his longstanding incompetency and apathy, compared to his colleagues.  http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2009/09-03-04.htm
 
I also encourage you to read all the reader comments to David Carr's excellent New York Times article
from Monday on the futures of American newspapers that quoted Alan, United, Newspapers May Stand
Readers comments at:

There were some spot-on comments there reminding everyone that many papers have all but given
up the ghost when it comes to being serious local news hounds, and are now just the middlemen
in handing readers over to advertisers, as this excerpt from Times Reader #3 says:

Yes, newspapers need to start getting their share of revenue from freeloading aggregators.
However, this idea that charging subscriptions online will ultimately keep papers afloat is
totally ludicrous. Newspapers don't sell news - they sell audiences to their advertisers. 
They're losing, because they've failed to do so. Charging for content will only drive readers away
- The Wall Street Journal might be able to pull that off, but the San Francisco Chronicle just can't.

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If you're not that familiar with The Miami News, a great overview is available at:
History of The Miami News (1896-1987) by Howard Kleinberg, Tequesta, 1987
http://digitalcollections.fiu.edu/tequesta/files/1987/87_1_01.pdf