Dear Miami Herald: That was not it.
A small piece from a local TV station about the accelerating fading of our local news rag.
PEMBROKE PARK, Fla. – The old Miami Herald was a powerhouse. Widely read, widely respected and making big money.
But along came the Internet, stealing eyeballs and advertising.
“We need to know what’s going on in the community. What’s going on that’s good. What’s going on that’s not good. But people are now relying frankly on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram…” says David Lawrence, former Miami Herald publisher.
What’s next for Miami Herald as it leaves Doral and hedge fund looks to buy the company?
Why was printed media so reluctant to change? If there is anything I learned from blogging is that it does not matter how “sexy an splashy” a website is, if there is not a constant and good content, it is all for naught. The newspapers have one advantage that other social media products do not have: The capacity of going in deep into a story. Why isn’t this exploited? Because the Newspapers have tried to duplicate speed of publishing rather than good content. They need to break the news rather than get to the truth, but as I never get tired of repeating, they are in the News Business and not in the Truth Business.
Take the other regional rag, the Suns Sentinel. Just as crappy as the Herald, but the work they did uncovering the screw ups that led to the Parkland High School massacre were the stuff of journalistic legend. I have no idea how many quotes they may have gotten from social media, but that work put everybody in the business to shame proving that good content is viable in their new ear of information.
Lawrence was the Herald’s publisher in its salad days. He had 420 newsroom employees and 100 more at El Nuevo Herald.
…
The 80 or so news people still at the Herald are doing some excellent work.
If my math is not wrong, personnel-wise the Miami Herald lost/let go 85% of its people from the numbers of their best days. You can try and excuse all you want about times changing, but this kind of reduction of personnel screams something else: Not enough sales. The why? That is not unclear, they simply forgot to cater to their readers.
Let me give you an example of adaptation. Old farts (and not so old) will remember this little free cheap magazine you could find in the entrances of supermarkets: Auto Trader. Hell How many of us, broke as hell ended up looking and buying a car from that magazine printed in really crappy paper?
You know where Auto Trader is now? Online, right you are. And with a net income of £197.7 million (I just found out that they are Brits ) By all the excuses we have been given and the competition from other sites and established companies, they should not be in business. But they are and with a 9 figure profit. You want to laugh? The American side of the business employs 859 people.
The Miami Herald made the mistake of being not so obvious about what kind of politics they side with. It has been my opinion that the crash dive began during the 2000 elections when they abandoned their long tradition of not backing a Presidential candidate and went full bore with Gore, even during the infamous recounts. I remember laughing the early morning day I read over coffee how grudgingly the Herald finally admitted that Bush had won the state after Democrat-induced recounts and lawyering.
But rather than take that loss as a lesson, they went even more dumb in their coverage and gave more relevance to their opinion writers than actually covering news that people wanted to know. I particularly got tired of opening the darn thing and have Leonard Pitts accusing anybody non-black of every malady happening in Black neighborhoods. And the constant portray of the NRA and its members as a White Only Racist organization by cartoonist Morin was just too over the top of political parody and was akin to 1930s cartoons blaming the Jews for all the shit happening in the world. I read the paper and I found out that besides bad stuff was my fault, I did not learn anything news about the happenings in my county unless they could be painted in racist of Liberal hues to attack my beliefs.
I dropped my subscription and apparently so many other South Floridians.
But it was Twitter that killed them….right.
UPDATE: I was reminded by scrappycrow that Auto Trader was not free and that is true. I think it was the real state rentals that was free and I got confused due to lack of caffeine. The error is corrected the error and I shall now retire to the corner with my dunce cap and a cup of java.
