The last time the Miami Herald mentioned Hallandale Beach City Hall's incompetency and antics was...

Despite all the self-evident cronyism, public corruption and intentional deceit emanating from the City Hall of this ocean-side city for years, the Miami Herald has sent a reporter to a City Commission meeting here just once since June of 2008.

For that dearth of coverage, while everything was going to hell, we can thank current Broward editor Jay Ducassi and his predecessor, Patricia Andrews.

What follows is an excerpt from the last item the Herald ran that dealt with actual governance in Hallandale Beach.
You remember August of last year, don't you?

Tiger Woods and Sandra Bullock were, separately, happily married to their spouses, Tom Brady was poised to take the Patriots back to the Super Bowl after an injury, and the Florida Marlins were still fighting for a National League Wild-card spot.
And Marco Rubio, whom I'd seen wow a crowd two months earlier, was trailing badly in state polls that South Florida's know-it-all reporters said proved Rubio simply didn't have the requisite experience and resources to beat a popular incumbent governor like Charlie Crist.
Some reporters even darkly hinted that it might be because he was Hispanic.
Hmm-m-m...

Miami Herald
POLITICAL BEAT

Monday, August 10, 2009

By Amy Sherman
HALLANDALE BEACH MINUTES APPROVED -- A FEW YEARS LATER

Hallandale Beach City Commissioner Keith London, often at odds with other city officials, cried foul at a meeting Wednesday as the commission approved meeting minutes as old as 2003.

"It seems a little bizarre to go back and approve minutes going back six years," said London, suggesting that the city is violating its own procedure about creating written minutes "as soon as practical."

London is also ticked that the city decided to publish brief minutes rather than a verbatim transcript. "They don't want people to know what's going on," he said in an interview.

At the meeting, acting City Clerk Shari Canada said her audit found some minutes that had yet to be officially approved. They included meetings where the commission sat as other city boards.

"The fact that they are tardy is of no legal consequence," city attorney David Jove said.

Mayor Joy Cooper said if the public wants to review debate from meetings, anyone can come to City Hall and review the video.

A week ago today... the road not taken with the Miami Herald and some 411 about Beth Reinhard to consider

Below is an excerpted version of an email that I sent
last Tuesday.

to		"Abad, Eva - Miami"
cc		"Landsberg, David" "Gyllenhaal, Anders"

I believe this explains why I won't be attending tonight.

By the way, about the below: the un-named condescending
Herald reporter referenced is Beth Reinhard, and since
I originally wrote this, yet another story has run in the
Herald on Lauren Book without ever mentioning that
she's going to be a Broward School Board candidate.
Par for the course.

--------------
(This was originally sent to Rick of the South Florida
Daily Blog with bcc's to... well, people from coast-to-coast.
Never heard back from him, though.
C'est la vie.)

Friday March 26th, 2010
4:00 p.m.

Dear Rick:
Have been meaning to contact you about something since
this past Monday, and when I saw you broach the subject
Thursday in your discussion on your blog regarding the
Miami Herald soliciting material from local area bloggers,
I knew that I needed to write and share what I knew with
you and others in the area before I put it off any longer.

Herald Uses Local Blogger For Content
http://southfloridadailyblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/herald-uses-local-blogger-for-content.html
...Now the real reason I'm writing.

Did you receive one of these invites from the Herald?
Just so you know, I never actually contacted them about
this, either.

More from me about this after the story on the Gothamist
purchase.

from Vanaver, Elissa - Miami to "Abad, Eva - Miami" date Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 1:39 PM subject Community News Network

Thank you for contacting us about The Miami Herald's new Community News Network. Now that we're launched, we invite you to join us on Tuesday, April 6, to learn more about how you can post your news, photos and videos on our new community channels.

Date: Tuesday, April 6

Time: 7 p.m.

Location: The Miami Herald

1 Herald Plaza

Conference Room A

Please RSVP to Eva Abad

Elissa Vanaver

VP of Human Resources

Assistant to the Publisher

-------
Paid Content
By Rafat Ali March 22, 2010

Exclusive
Local Blog Network Gothamist Being Bought by Cablevision’s Rainbow Media

Gothamist, the local city blog network that is best known for its New York City edition, is being acquired by Cablevision-owned Rainbow Media, paidContent has learned. The price is between $5 million to $6 million, though we understand a good portion of that is a performance-based earnout.

Read the rest of the post at: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-local-blog-network-gothamist-being-bought-by-cablevisions-rainbow-media/

See also: http://outside.in/studies

Early last Friday night, I got an out-of-the-blue phone call
from someone at the Herald asking me if I'd received an
invitation to some event they were throwing having to do
with the launch of their "News Network."

After finally realizing that the phone call was legit, I laughed
and said that on the face of it, I thought that I was unlikely
to contribute material, photos or videos, given how often I
criticize the newspaper, whether due to its intellectually-shallow
editorials, poor editing and overall story selection, their Sunday
Op-Ed section being the worst of any paper in the country of its
size, plus, the all-too-obvious biases and limitations of certain of
its political reporters, whose complete and utter predictability
and conventional wisdom would've been embarrassing in 1989,
much less, the year 2010.

Where oh where are all the positive necessary changes
they should've made last year?

They have far too many genuinely unappealing blogs yet STILL
don't have an Education blog in the year 2010?
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/blogs/

They still have no Broward-oriented columnist that local
Broward County residents could read 2-3 times a week about
issues they're interested in, instead of having so many Cuba/
Sweetwater/ Calle Ocho-centric columns falling down upon us
everyday, as if Broward was terra incognita.

I'm a Blue Dog Democrat who'd like to see a smart and savvy
in-house Conservative columnist at the Herald opining on things
hereabouts, since this area is a target-rich environment of clearly
tired ideas and political and social personalities on life support
that need to be skewered and held-up to long overdue scrutiny,
but which never are.

So where-oh-where is that Conservative voice at the Herald
who'd strongly challenge the prevailing orthodoxy there at the
paper and in the community?
Sadly, it is yet another one of the things to come there that
never actually quite arrives.

The Herald's current notions of diversity, all too often,
consists of people of many creeds and colors all speaking
in unison, which is not really a voice so much as it is a chorus.

I'm really tired of seeing them run Miami news on the Broward
homepage of the website -like that perennial, flooding on
Miami Beach!-the sorts of stories which are already on their
website at the top anyway.

Those are the ones I've recorded with a lot of screen-shots over
the past year or so, but which I've never run and posted about
because it's so damn depressing, especially after the fact.

While it's nice that they are FINALLY running 6-8 more pieces
a day on their Naked Politics blog compared to their former
pitiful output, the fact remains that they have no video component
to that blog in the way of a YouTube page, like the Sun-Sentinel's
Broward Politics blog, http://www.youtube.com/BrowardPolitics
and too many items are run in Naked Politics that ought to be
running elsewhere, but the Herald has no other place to put them.

The perfect recent example of this is their post last week on cute-
but-completely-inexperienced Lauren Book-Lim, super-lobbyist
Ron Book's daughter, that in a normal newspaper, ought to have
been on the Education blog, since it's pretty clear she's running
for an open Broward School Board seat, which could necessarily
preclude her father from lobbying there

http://www.browardbeat.com/waiting-for-the-800-pound-gorilla/

http://www.browardbeat.com/index.php?s=%22Lauren+Book%22

which would make that a big story among those of us who care
about public policy in Broward.

See also http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2010/03/a-survivors-walk.html and http://www.facebook.com/people/Lauren-Book-Lim/10617635

But since they don't have an Education blog...

In any case, the Herald's Patricia Mazzei NEVER even
mentions her possible School Board candidacy in the most
recent post.
It's so damn maddening!

Thank God for the St. Pete Times political reporters that they
now run, otherwise...

As it happens, the Herald went ahead without ever telling me
and listed my blog on their South Florida blogs page when it was
first introduced last year.
http://yourblogs.miamiherald.com/

I only discovered I was on their Communities page when
someone I know in Miami mentioned that they'd seen it linked
there.
And that was a few weeks after they'd been running it.

That struck me as a very odd way of doing business
or creating relationships.

As to that invite above that I received on Monday, I'm going to assume
that if they are calling me and asking me to listen to their marketing pitch,
that given how many more people read your blog, you must've already
received something like this quite some time ago.

I'm not inclined to participate when the sad reality is that I'm much more
likely to get a quicker and more professional response to an email of mine
from Herald Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal than I do from 99.9%
of their reporters, columnists or editors, esp. their largely invisible Broward
editors.

Gyllenhaal has actually written me a few times in the past 18 months
after I had bcc'd him about some troubling things I'd seen in the paper,
and I genuinely believe that he wants the newspaper and its product to
be much better, as do a handful of reporters there that I genuinely trust
and wish would be given more latitude in what they write about, so that
everyone benefits.

I'm just not that convinced that a majority of the people down at the
Herald necessarily want meaningful positive change readers are
clamoring for, including me.

Even after everything that's gone on there with the layoffs, there's an
awful lot of contrived and mediocre notions afloat there about what the
paper ought to be that to my mind, and many of the reporters there,
are gumming-up the works.

I hear somewhat regularly from reporters there about actions that
show more people than you think are still very resistant to some positive,
meaningful change that would benefit everyone.

Let me share a recent Herald anecdote that involves me:
Two weeks ago, a well-known Herald reporter called a local Broward
politician I know about something that I'd written about with 100%
certainty, and asked the pol what they thought of what I'd written.

What the reporter on the phone didn't know was that I was actually
in the room at the time standing next to this person when her phone
call came thru, and heard the entire conversation on speakerphone,
including the condescending reference to a short pithy email of mine
as "crazy mail" and me as "that blogger guy in Hallandale."

Like she couldn't bear to actually say my name or the
name of my blog, even though I had the story and the
Herald didn't.

To me, that attitude of hers explains a lot about why the Herald
is in the very sad shape it's in, despite having some very talented
people who could make it much better.

I guess I hardly need mention, do I, that this particular reporter
was NOT someone I'd even originally sent that particular email to,
since I have such a low regard for her, but someone else at the
newspaper whom I did send it to, clearly forwarded it to her since
it was so obvious that there was a story there on a silver platter
about govt. cronyism and no-bid contracts and HB Mayor Joy
Cooper

It was yet another local Broward govt. news story this particular
reporter knew nothing about, but typically, she never thought
to actually contact me about it, she called others who didn't know
anything about it until I told them via email and my subsequent
blog posting.

Well, that was more than ten days ago and the story has never
seen the light of day in the Herald or any of its myriad blogs.
Nowhere but my humble blog.
It's really dumbfounding.

Patricia Andrews, the Herald's former Broward bureau chief
was someone who had covered Hollywood and Hallandale Beach
back when I was living-up in the Washington, D.C. area, so I quite
naturally thought that she'd be especially receptive to hearing
about some very troubling things going on in the area that I and
many others were eyewitnesses to.
She was not.
She NEVER responded to a single email of mine,

She also never responded to occasional emails from about a dozen
or so other concerned HB residents, asking why she and the paper
were ignoring all the self-evident corruption and non-compliance
with the state's Sunshine Laws at HB City Hall.

Even now, the Herald has never written about the mayor suing
HB civic activist and blogger Michael Butler, a trusted friend of
mine, or even more troubling, the current HB Police Chief having
tried to frame and prosecute two innocent people -cops, no less-
in order to ingratiate himself with HB City Manager Mike Good
and Mayor Joy Cooper -and that TWO separate Broward
County juries ruled against him and the city by returning
verdicts against the city in less than 15 minutes.

Verdicts that resulted in HB taxpayers paying hundreds
of thousands of dollars in damages.

Yet the status and future of this corrupt Police Chief has NEVER
been discussed in a HB City Commission meeting, for obvious reasons,
even though in most parts of the country, that conduct would've
resulted in an immediate firing -and him being in prison now.

Another stellar example of Broward SAO Mike Satz doing
nothing!

None of what I've just mentioned has ever appeared in the Herald,
yet now they want my assistance?
I don't think that's going to happen.

For the record, the Herald has sent exactly one reporter to a HB City
Commission since June of 2008.

Before I forget, go to this animated video on paidcontent.org's site
titled Stop the Presses: How to Save Newspapers by Ted Rall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7qd8v8v2qk

Adios!

Dave

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Abad, Eva - Miami
Date: Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 2:17 PM
Subject: REMINDER: Community News meeting AT THE MIAMI HERALD
To:

If you haven't RSVP's please contact me as soon as you can.

Thanks!!!

Eva Abad
HR/Community Affairs Specialist

Executive Assistant

The Miami Herald

-----Original Message-----

From: Abad, Eva - Miami
On Behalf Of Vanaver, Elissa - Miami

Sent: Monday, March 22, 2010 1:39 PM

To: Abad, Eva - Miami

Subject: Community News Network

Thank you for contacting us about The Miami Herald's new Community News Network. Now that we're launched, we invite you to join us on Tuesday, April 6, to learn more about how you can post your news, photos and videos on our new community channels.

Date: Tuesday, April 6

Time: 7 p.m.

Location: The Miami Herald

1 Herald Plaza

Conference Room A

Please RSVP to Eva Abad

Elissa Vanaver

VP of Human Resources

Assistant to the Publisher

Someone needs to watch the politicians -it won't be the Miami Herald

My comments follow the column

-----------------

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/columnists/beth-reinhard/story/949348.html

Miami Herald

Someone needs to watch the politicians

By Beth Reinhard

March 14, 2009

In an eerily prescient plot line in Carl Hiaasen's 2002 novel Basket Case, an intrepid reporter whose stories have sent three politicians to jail leaves the newspaper for another job and isn't replaced.

Another reporter is told to keep an eye on the local government, but he covers a city council that also meets Tuesday nights, forcing him to alternate his attendance between the two municipalities.

The politicians time their misdeeds accordingly: Property taxes and garbage fees go up, a tire dump and a warehouse park are built in residential neighborhoods, and everybody gets a pay raise.

The weary reporter quits, so the newspaper dumps his job on somebody else -who also covers city council meetings on Tuesday nights.

"For the corrupt politicians in our circulation area, it was a dream come true," writes Hiaasen, a Miami Herald columnist who says newspapers regularly inform his fiction. "The unsuspecting citizens of three communities . . . were being semi-regularly reamed and ripped off by their elected representatives, all because the newspaper could no longer afford to show up."

Imagine this scenario playing out in city after city, and you have a pretty good idea of the political fallout of a newspaper industry on the wane. This is the best thing that ever happened to crooked pols since manila envelopes.

This week, The Miami Herald announced its third round of layoffs in a year. Just another day in an industry where a number of media companies are struggling to survive.

This column is not a self-serving sob story about people losing their jobs, because that is happening to everyone except foreclosure auctioneers and bankruptcy lawyers. The public's interest is at stake here, as newspapers have long been the meanest and best government watchdogs around.

When the scrappy, Pulitzer Prize-winning Rocky Mountain News shut down on Feb. 27, it posted a poignant video on its website in which reporters and readers talk about the vital role of the Fourth Estate. Editor John Temple says readers frequently refer to the paper not as "the Rocky," but as "my Rocky," reflecting their feeling of communal ownership in the newsgathering enterprise.

This is personal.

In Florida, a robust and competitive network of daily newspapers has thrived in a sort of journalism hothouse, where strong public records laws and weak-kneed politicians laid fertile ground for muckraking. But every paper has been forced to reduce its coverage or give up entire communities in recent years. The Tallahassee press corps has shrunk dramatically, and in Washington the owners of the Tampa Tribune and the Palm Beach Post plan to shutter their bureaus.

Sure, the explosive growth of blogs and other online outlets is helping fill the void. Some of the best scoops of the 2008 campaign first appeared outside the mainstream press. Local gadflies, out-of-work reporters and other rabbler rousers are posting great stuff.

But the best journalism is frequently labor-intensive and expensive. Someone drawing a paycheck has to take the time to sit through the city council meeting, scour the annual budget or truth-squad a campaign ad.

The Herald and other papers are partnering with former competitors in an effort to fill the gaps. Big-mouthed readers have always helped us stay in the loop, and we need you more than ever to be our eyes and ears on the ground.

Somebody has got to get to that Tuesday night city council meeting.

Beth Reinhard is the political writer for The Miami Herald.

Reader comments at:

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/columnists/beth-reinhard/story/949348.html?commentSort=TimeStampAscending&pageNum=1

Abandoned Miami Herald vending machine next to FEC

Raiload tracks, Biscayne Boulevard & N.E. 187th Street,

Aventura, FL

April 21, 2009 photo by South Beach Hoosier

The Miami Herald has not had a reporter at a

Hallandale Beach City Commission meeting since early

June of 2008, when Breanne Gilpatrick attended the

joint meeting with the City of Hollywood at the Hallandale

Beach Cultural Center.

She was only there because like the situation cited above,

both cities have their meetings on Wednesdays.

But she was clearly there for Hollywood, as Hallandale

Beach was simply the side dish.

That meeting was noteworthy for two things: that there

were many Hollywood City Hall officials who confided

to me that they could not find the building because

there were -and are not now- any directional signs

on U.S.-1 indicating where it was located, and also

for the fact that HB Mayor Joy Cooper tried to

persuade the City of Hollywood -unsuccessfully-

to adopt her strategy of threatening to sue the

State of Florida so they didn't have to comply with

the state's deadlines and requirements

regarding ocean outfall pollution.

This coming Wednesday, the date of the first City

Commission meeting in May, that will mark precisely

eleven months since the Herald deigned to show up.

Woody Allen famously said that "Ninety percent

of life is just showing up"

So what lessons should we draw from never

showing-up?

Over those same eleven months, as one shocking

thing after another has transpired here, I've directly

and indirectly contacted Beth Reinhard numerous

times to make her and her colleagues aware of matters

of public interest here fully deserving a level of scrutiny,

as well as Herald Broward section editor Patricia

Andrews, Herald Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal

and Herald Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos.

(The latter really ought to have a weekly column,

not a once-in-a-while schedule the Herald gives

him, which only serves to make anything he writes

about seem dated by the time you read it,

an arrangement he himself can not be happy with.

Seriously, why no Herald blog for him?)

Whatever my serious disagreements with them about

the quality or volume of product churned out, Messrs

Gyllenhall and Scumacher-Matos have taken the

time to write back a few times with their thoughts and

concerns after such correspondence, but Reinhard

and Andrews, nary a peep.

Welcome to the State of South Florida Journalism

2009.

---------------

Draw near and consider:

Much has been said, written and analyzed, and yet this

overwhelming mass of facts has heretofore furnished no

evidence to the unconscious Miami Herald and its

journalistic kindred, from which to pluck a belief that the

acts of the crowd at Hallandale Beach City Hall and

their dutiful cronies were unethical forays, and that there

really has existed and continues to exist at 400 South

Federal Highway a most unethical and malodorous stench.

A putrid stench that clearly marks behavior most foul

that serves as daily impediment to the full and faithful

discharge of public duty.

The Millenium Building, 2500 East Hallandale Beach Blvd.,

Hallandale Beach, FL

April 25, 2009 photo by South Beach Hoosier

But comes one blogger, me, and one website writer,

Change Hallandale, unafraid of the behind-the-scenes

machinations and armed with facts to fill many a

cupboard, after the Herald long avoided taking notice

of what transpires there, and makes a statement to

the public and continually shows it online, and, presto,

the veil is rent; light succeeds to darkness,

and credit to defamation.

With such a recantation avaunt!

We do not want it; we can do best without it.

We have taken the measure of the Herald lo these

many months and found without exception that it

was lacking in seriousness of purpose and moral

clarity when such qualities were ideal prescriptions

for what has long ailed this town hard by the sea.

And so we persevere, ourselves, in the task once

commenced, for if not us and our allies, who will

carry the torch and ask reasonable questions that

make autocrats angry and seethe, demand a degree

of accountability, from people who clearly delight

in the Herald's apathy, a fact which is but common

knowledge hereabouts?

And what of the political friends and benefactors

of the very Rubber Stamp Crew that has made

this town simultaneously, a mockery, a punchline,

a laughingstock of the worst sort?

Those who are by practice but blind to what lies

directly before their immediate gaze and scurry

like the ostrich, eager to find that comfortable

hole that their empty heads hath grown so

accustomed to?

Patience dear friend, patience!

Do not despair.

The bosom friends of the powers-that-be of

this town are well known to me and others,

and their deeds and names have been entered

into a list that will one day delight and amuse

you, as you read about their offers of aid and

support, knowing that they, too, have become

ensnared in the web of their friends' daily

falsehoods and calumnies.

Trust me, friends, you will come to know these

names too, I promise.

Sooner than they know!

The idylls of summer swelter are near at hand.

When they be over, you at One Herald Plaza

will unsay your present tale, but it will be too late.

The sands of Time will have further turned your

remaining power into idle boasts that prove pitiable,

proving once again that the common curse of

South Florida journalism be not just folly and

ignorance, but vanity and apathy.

If our health is spared and a summer hurricane

passes not by our fair shores, we shall give to

the people of this town, as well as to the state

lawgivers legally assembled, who seek truth,

a brief history of our revelations, and in the

name of reform, accountability and democracy,

all so long in exile from this community,

but with the word of truth, appeal to their justice.

And rest assured, friends, there WILL BE

a public accounting, for who knew what, when,

and who did nothing but join in the mockery

at the public's expense.

That future public accounting animates my daily

travails, as it does so many others in this community,

so sure are we that each day is but one day closer

to that fateful day of public reckoning.

People who long for something better than what

they have heretofore known, and who while longing

for sheer civic normalcy, have instead found gross

deceit and self-dealing, shenanigans of every size

and shape, and false words repeatedly spoken

with no intent of follow-through and resolution.

The tape that may soon bedeck the halls of Hallandale

Beach City Hall and environs?

For those in power in South Florida who are but

dear friends of the Rubber Stamp Crew that

is currently in power, let them say no longer that

they did not know what transpired here under the

guise of governance, and who were the guilty

parties at the very heart of every embarrassing

scandal and debacle, forever plotting, scheming

and attempting to obfuscate the truth,

so that their anti-democratic plans would be

rendered invisible to the citizens they purport

to represent.

For those of us who cared to look, it was there

all the time, but some consciously chose not

to see.

The Miami Herald is but the most obvious enabler

on that long list, but they were not the only ones.

For we who have followed the facts as we found

them, and connected dots not seen by others,

know well the names of the others, too, as

surely as we know our own names.

How can we not?

And you will come to learn them here in

this place, too.

Hallandale Beach Blog

South Beach Hoosier