Reporter’s Notebook: Miami Herald Prepares to Leave Bastion on the Bay

The building, home of The Miami Herald, was built half a century ago on the waterfront just shy of downtown, in part to accommodate barges loaded down with newsprint for the presses. It was also intended to stand watch over Miami, a town forever on the cusp of another transformation.

For decades, news could literally be seen from the windows of The Herald: a dead body (or two) bobbed past in the bay, a man clambered up a radio tower sprinkling nonsensical notes like confetti, and Hurricane Andrew paid a memorable visit in 1992 but scarcely rattled the stormproof building. Down in the lobby, a prominent local politician committed suicide. A short sprint away, one man chewed off another man’s face.

The building and its most famous tenant stood for something. But soon, both will be gone.

“This place said, ‘We’re watching,’ ” said Lisa Gibbs, a former business editor at The Herald who attended a farewell party last week, her tissues at the ready just in case. “It’s hard for me to think that something really hasn’t been lost.”

“Plus, it’s got the best view in journalism,” she added.

Come June, the blocklong building, with its helipad, its ground-floor printing presses and a giant billboard blocking part of the bay view, will stand idle, a workmanlike shell without the workers. The building is expected to be demolished, flicked off the grid after failing to win landmark preservation status. In 2011, the McClatchy Company, which owns The Herald, sold the building for $236 million to the Genting Group, a Malaysian hotel and casino operator that will begin building a luxury resort and condominiums on the site. Genting’s plans for a giant casino failed to gain traction last year but will most likely resurface in 2014.

Herald employees will move into a renovated building in Doral, a small city on the west side of Miami-Dade County best known for its tangle of traffic, its proximity to the airport, affordable warehouses and an annual golf tournament. The building was the home of the military’s United States Southern Command.

But the demise of The Herald’s longtime home and the newspaper’s gallop away from the heart of the city are symptoms of a much larger problem: the retreat and retrenchment of newspapers in the digital age and their waning influence. In a city that produces a limitless number of crooked public officials, overeager developers and outlandish criminals, The Miami Herald has scooped up 20 Pulitzer Prizes and has inspired dread in wrongdoers. It also minted talent like Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, Edna Buchanan and many others with less recognizable names.

Reporters on the dwindling staff still wade into the muck, winning accolades and respect. With the newspaper thrashed by budget cuts and scores of departures in recent years, reporters find themselves overwhelmed by the never-ending news cycle and hustle for online clicks.

“The building was symbolic of being a powerful institution in the community, and I think that many newspapers are not as powerful as they used to be in the community,” said Kelly McBride, a senior faculty member for ethics, reporting and writing at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“You were downtown because you needed to be close to all these institutions,” she said. “But with the digital environment and the mobile environment, you can do your reporting from anywhere, and often you are doing it across the transom.”

At the farewell party, nearly 1,000 Herald alumni from an assortment of departments (including this former Herald reporter) showed up. People gathered on The Herald’s terrace overlooking the glistening bay and the city’s ever-changing skyline, sipping cheap Champagne, trading “remember when” stories and lustily criticizing the business’s bean counters. The gathering, which began in midafternoon and ended for a handful in the wee hours at Miami’s oldest tavern, Tobacco Road, was as much a reunion as it was a celebration of old-school journalism.

The paper’s fifth-floor newsroom, at least the 1980s version of it, will be forever showcased in the films “Absence of Malice,” with Sally Field and Paul Newman, and “The Mean Season,” with Kurt Russell.

The Herald’s reporters and editors concede that the building in Doral has its advantages: it is primed for digital journalism. It will be freshly painted, sleek and modern. It has no asbestos. The Herald’s photo editor, David Walters, mined his brain for another redeeming quality, this one involving the confounding spelling abilities of his visually talented staff.

“Photographers like Doral because it is spelled with five letters,” he joked.

Jim Savage, the retired longtime investigations editor, said that without question one of his best days at One Herald Plaza was scoring an office with a bay view. From that vantage point, he edited many prizewinning articles and watched a suicidal jumper leap off a bridge. He immediately called 911, but the operator, shrugging him off, told him to call the Coast Guard.

“I did,” he said. “But they are miles away.” The man swam to the building’s dock and was hauled off to a hospital.

Which brought to mind a former city editor’s first day on the job. He walked into the newsroom, looked out a window and saw “a floater,” a dead body drifting slowly in the current.

“We’re not going to get that outside in Doral,” said Andres Viglucci, a veteran Miami Herald reporter. Then, as the festivities rolled along on the bay-front terrace below him, he sat down to write an article for the next day’s newspaper.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/us/miami-herald-prepares-to-leave-bastion-on-the-bay.html?partner=rss&emc=rss