December 7, 2024

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

Companies Looking to Tap Chinese Demand Abroad

HONG KONG — The Malaysian casino operator Genting envisions red-and-gold pagodas and a panda exhibit on the 87 acres of Las Vegas land it bought this week, a new gambling playground for rich Chinese moving their money overseas.

A 90-minute flight away from those 35 hectares, in San Francisco, China’s biggest property developer has formed a joint venture to develop two high-rise condominium towers that are likely to draw wealthy Chinese buyers. It is the first foray by the company, China Vanke, into the U.S. market, and probably not its last.

Combined, the two deals are worth about $1 billion, which could rise to at least $3 billion as Genting completes its resort, which is due to open in 2016. That is just a fraction of the $102 billion in investment abroad from companies in the Asia-Pacific region in 2012, according to Thomson Reuters data.

But it signals a strategic shift.

Instead of hunting for natural resources, the driving force behind many of Asia’s biggest foreign acquisitions over the past year, these companies are investing in the United States to cater to Chinese consumers abroad.

Beijing bars individuals from moving more than the equivalent of about $50,000 a year out of the country. Yet vast sums leak out illegally. Estimates vary widely on just how much, but the research group Global Financial Integrity said the total in 2011 alone could have been as much as $472 billion.

The money goes to places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, London and San Francisco, where a heavy flow of Chinese buyers has driven up property prices. But until the Genting and Vanke deals, there was little evidence that large Asian companies were chasing the cash to the United States.

“You have Chinese money sitting in U.S. houses and Chinese money sitting in U.S. banks. If you’re smart, you start setting up places for Chinese people to stay and things for them to buy,” said Derek Scissors, an economist who tracks Chinese foreign investment for the Heritage Foundation, a research organization in Washington.

Mr. Scissors said the Genting and Vanke deals represented another step in the progression of Chinese investment in the United States since the global financial crisis.

First, individual Chinese investors started pouring money into U.S. property in late 2009. Then, a couple of years later, Chinese property developers began searching for deals, largely unsuccessfully. The Genting and Vanke transactions are early signs that Asian companies see ways to tap Chinese demand beyond China, something few U.S. companies seem to have recognized.

The property that Genting bought had been abandoned since 2008, and the deal is the biggest new investment on the Las Vegas Strip since then. In that time, China’s gambling capital, Macau, has opened four new casinos — two of them built by the U.S. company Las Vegas Sands.

Genting has casinos in cities like Singapore, which is popular with Chinese visitors, but not in Macau, the world’s biggest gambling hub. The company is not guaranteed success in Las Vegas, a market with tougher competition and thinner margins than those in Genting’s power base in Singapore, where it operates one of only two casinos.

Its arrival could spell trouble for casino rivals, too.

The ratings agency Fitch warned that Genting’s arrival was a “risk” for U.S. operators because its project would add 3,500 hotel rooms in a city where occupancy was flat last year and the average daily rate a tepid 2.8 percent higher.

“We believe the property will target high-end Asian customers, which has been the principal catalyst for gaming revenue growth on the Strip since 2010,” Fitch said, adding that high-end properties run by Sands, Wynn Resorts and others were “especially vulnerable to the increased competition from Genting.”

For Vanke, venturing into the United States makes sense now because Beijing is clamping down on property speculation at home. New restrictions announced March 1 may speed the flow of Chinese property investment abroad.

Vanke “will go anywhere mainland Chinese want to go,” said Jinsong Du, a property analyst at Credit Suisse in Hong Kong. “Their target customer is not overseas Chinese. Their target customer is mainland Chinese who want to migrate to overseas, or have a home outside the country.”

Vanke’s president, Yu Liang, however, said the company had no intention of building a Chinese community overseas.

“What we are looking for is overseas resources and market, not Chinese immigrants. We place emphasis on the concept of harmony,” he said.

Other Asian companies might learn from the example set by Vanke and Genting.

Jonathan Galaviz, managing director at Galaviz Co., a California-based research and strategic advisory company, said real estate and hotel companies like CapitaLand in Singapore and Sun Hung Kai Properties in Hong Kong were running the risk of losing global relevance, as they lacked a U.S. presence.

In an e-mailed statement, Sun Hung Kai said it aimed for a balance between steady cash flow and fast asset turnover.

“Geographically, Hong Kong remains our focus. The Group is also positive about the long-term outlook for the mainland and will continue to expand its business there,” it said.

A spokeswoman for CapitaLand declined to comment.

“Companies like these, and others in Asia, need to also recognize they are investing in potentially overheated markets in mainland China — and elsewhere in Asia — and diversifying some asset holdings in America would be something smart to do,” Mr. Galaviz said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/business/global/companies-looking-to-tap-chinese-demand-abroad.html?partner=rss&emc=rss