printing presses

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

High & Low Finance: Learning to Live With Debt

Seldom have those twin realities been as stark as they are now. It was excessive debt brought on by too-easy credit that brought down the American economy and allowed some European countries to borrow money they will never be able to pay back. It is fear of debt that threatens to keep the United States from doing much to prevent a double dip recession.

A considerable part of the current economic strain stems from the fact that the credit overhang continues to haunt borrowers around the world. The lenders may have been bailed out, but the borrowers were not — or at least not enough to return them to health. Millions of Americans remain underwater on mortgage loans. Countries that lack printing presses for their own currency find themselves unable to borrow from private lenders.

In the long run, inflation may be a significant part of the solution, enabling borrowers to pay back dollars and euros that are worth a lot less than the ones they borrowed. The soaring price of gold, now around $1,650 an ounce, makes sense only if you assume something like that is going to happen.

But for now, such inflation is not on the horizon. To get by, the sad reality is that those who can raise capital may need to do so for the benefit of others. Germany has grudgingly moved toward that with the latest bailout of Greece, but the United States — which now pays 2.4 percent to borrow money for 10 years, more than a percentage point less than it paid six months ago — seemingly has no desire to try to save its own economy, let alone anyone else’s.

The effort to slash spending with the possibility of a new recession looming may be foolish. Larry Summers, the economist and former Treasury secretary, pointed out in The Financial Times this week that tax receipts over the next decade would be about $1 trillion lower — and debt that much larger — if economic growth were shaved by half a percentage point a year. That is about the same amount that the bill passed this week claims it will save.

It appears that not much of that saving will be in the next couple of years, although the further cuts promised late this year could change that.

What is needed now is both a willingness to spend to offset the impact of the last debt debacle and a determined effort to ensure it does not happen again. But those efforts are stalling. Banks are lobbying with some success in both the United States and Europe to delay and weaken capital requirements.

And the American government shows no interest in doing anything about the incentives in current law that favor borrowing over equity. If you buy a house with the largest mortgage possible, you will pay lower taxes than if you borrowed less. Companies pay interest on loans out of pretax income, so the more they owe, the less they pay in taxes. But dividends are paid out of after-tax money.

“The U.S. tax system encourages household leverage and bank leverage, even though both are potentially destabilizing,” is the way Narayana Kocherlakota, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, put it in a recent speech. He offered a rather modest suggestion: lower the proportion of interest payments that are deductible.

There are, of course, claims that both tax policies produce greater good for the society, by encouraging homeownership and corporate investment. He suggested “replacing the mortgage interest deduction with a tax credit that offsets part of a buyer’s down payment toward a home purchase. Such a tax credit would encourage homeownership without simultaneously providing more incentives for households to accumulate more debt.” And lower corporate income tax rates, he said, could offset reductions in the deductibility of interest “without simultaneously providing incentives for corporations to acquire leverage.”

The fact that those suggestions have virtually no political support reflects one of the great political and economic challenges of this era: Governments now feel a need to encourage economic growth, but don’t want to spend money. Encouraging leverage seems like a good idea.

But it does have major risks. “A financial system with dangerously low capital levels — hence prone to major collapses — creates a nontransparent contingent liability for the federal budget in the United States,” said Simon Johnson, an M.I.T. economist and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, in Congressional testimony last week. “This can only lead to further instability, deep recessions, and damage to our fiscal balance sheet, in a version of what the Bank of England refers to as a ‘doom loop.’ ”

In plain English, he means Uncle Sam will get stuck with the debt when banks blow up. The fact that happened in the recent cycle is a major cause of the rising debt that seems so alarming to those who demand immediate cuts in spending totally unrelated to the financial crisis.

To hear banks tell it, every extra dollar of capital that they are forced to hold is one dollar less they can lend, and one dollar less of economic growth that the world desperately needs.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=106c2a1868a87d4a89cb89cb0bb83656

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

High & Low Finance: Learning to Live With Debt

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