Miami Herald
The Miami Herald is an American daily newspaper owned by The McClatchy Company and headquartered in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Founded in 1903, The Miami Herald serves the Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe counties in South Florida.
The newspaper once circulated throughout Florida, Latin America, and the Caribbean, but is primarily focused on South Florida. The Miami Herald has been awarded 24 Pulitzer Prizes. It reaches more than 1.5 million people each week, and millions of readers per month.
Overview
The newspaper has been awarded 24 Pulitzer Prizes since beginning publication in 1903. The paper's well-known columnists include Pulitzer-winning political commentator Leonard Pitts Jr., Pulitzer-winning reporter Mirta Ojito, humorist Dave Barry and novelist Carl Hiaasen. Other columnists have included Fred Grimm and sportswriters Michelle Kaufman, Edwin Pope, Dan Le Batard, Bea Hines and Greg Cote.The Miami Herald participates in "Politifact Florida", a website that focuses on Florida issues, with the Tampa Bay Times. The Herald and the Times share resources on news stories related to Florida.
History
20th century
In 1903, Frank B. Stoneman, father of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, reorganized and moved the Orlando Record to Miami. The first edition was published September 15, 1903, as the Miami Evening Record. After the recession of 1907, the newspaper had severe financial difficulties. In December 1907 it began to publish as the Miami Morning News-Record. Its largest creditor was Henry Flagler. Through a loan from Henry Flagler, Frank B. Shutts, who was also the founder of the law firm Shutts & Bowen, acquired the paper and renamed it the Miami Herald on December 1, 1910. Shutts, originally from Indiana, had come to Florida to monitor the bankruptcy proceedings of the Fort Dallas Bank. Although it is the longest continuously published newspaper in Miami, the earliest newspaper in the region was The Tropical Sun, established in 1891. The Miami Metropolis, which later became The Miami News, was founded in 1896, and was the Heralds oldest competitor until 1988, when it went out of business.During the Florida land boom of the 1920s, the Miami Herald was the largest newspaper in the world, as measured by lines of advertising. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the Herald came close to receivership, but recovered.
On October 25, 1939, John S. Knight, son of a noted Ohio newspaperman, bought the Herald from Frank B. Shutts. Knight became editor and publisher, and made his brother, James L. Knight, the business manager. The Herald had 383 employees. Lee Hills arrived as city editor in September 1942. He later became the Heralds publisher and eventually the chairman of Knight-Ridder Inc., a position he held until 1981.
The Herald was also involved in its first First Amendment Supreme Court case, Pennekamp v. Florida 328 U.S. 331, in which it and one of its editors, John D. Pennekamp for whom John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park is named for, were held in contempt of court by the Dade County Circuit Court for two publications it made on November 2 and November 7, 1944, both of which were critical of the court's operations. The Supreme Court sided with Pennekamp and the Herald, and ultimately held that under the facts of that case, "the danger to fair judicial administration has not the clearness and immediacy necessary to close the door of permissible public comment, and the judgment is reversed as violative of petitioners' right of free expression in the press under the First and Fourteenth Amendments."
The Miami Herald International Edition, printed by partner newspapers throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, began in 1946. It is commonly available at resorts in the Caribbean countries such as the Dominican Republic, and, though printed by the largest local newspaper Listín Diario, it is not available outside such tourist areas. It was extended to Mexico in 2002.
The Herald won its first Pulitzer Prize in 1950, for its reporting on Miami's organized crime. Its circulation was 176,000 daily and 204,000 on Sundays.
On August 19, 1960, construction began on the Herald building on Biscayne Bay. Also on that day, Alvah H. Chapman, started work as James Knight's assistant. Chapman was later promoted to Knight-Ridder chairman and chief executive officer. The Herald moved into its new building at One Herald Plaza without missing an edition on March 23–24, 1963.
The paper also won another press freedom case in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo. In the case, Pat Tornillo Jr., president of the United Teachers of Dade, had requested that the Herald print his rebuttal to an editorial criticizing him, citing Florida's "right-to-reply" law, which mandated that newspapers print such responses. Represented by longtime counsel Dan Paul, the Herald challenged the law, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. The Court unanimously overturned the Florida statute under the Press Freedom Clause of the First Amendment, ruling that "Governmental compulsion on a newspaper to publish that which 'reason' tells it should not be published is unconstitutional." The decision showed the limitations of a 1969 decision, Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications Commission, in which a similar "fairness doctrine" had been upheld for radio and television, and establishing that broadcast and print media had different Constitutional protections.
The first African American man to be a reporter at the Herald was Thirlee Smith, Jr. in 1967.
The first African American woman to work as a reporter at the Miami Herald was Bea Hines, starting on June 16, 1970. Hines was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for columns which included topics like police brutality and profiling.
Publication of a Spanish-language supplemental insert named El Herald began in 1976. It was renamed El Nuevo Herald in 1987, and in 1998 became an independent publication. The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald quickly took diverging editorial directions, sometimes leading to tense relations and conflicting information about the Hispanic community in the USA.
In 1997, the Miami Herald assigned the first national reporter charged with covering LGBT news. Reporter Steve Rothaus, who had been with the paper since 1985, was assigned to this post. After more than 33 years with the paper, Rothaus retired in 2019 as part of a buyout offer made to 450 employees.
21st century
In 2002, the Miami Herald launched its own Home & Design magazine. In 2003, the Miami Herald and El Universal of Mexico City created an international joint venture, and in 2004 they together launched The Herald Mexico, a short-lived English-language newspaper for readers in Mexico. Its final issue was published in May 2007.On July 27, 2005, former Miami city commissioner Arthur Teele walked into the main lobby of the Heralds headquarters and phoned Herald columnist Jim DeFede, one of several telephone conversations that the two had had during the day, to say that he had a package for DeFede. He then asked a security officer to tell his wife Stephanie that he loved her, before pulling out a gun and committing suicide. This happened the day the Miami New Times, a weekly newspaper, published salacious details of Teele's alleged affairs, including allegations that he had had sex and used cocaine with a transsexual prostitute.
The day before committing suicide, Teele had had another telephone conversation with DeFede, who recorded this call without Teele's knowledge, which was illegal under Florida law. DeFede admitted to the Heralds management that he had taped the call. Although the paper used quotes from the tape in its coverage, DeFede was fired the next day for violating the paper's code of ethics, and he was likely guilty of a felony.
Many journalists and readers of the Herald disagreed with the decision to fire rather than suspend DeFede, arguing that it had been made in haste and that the punishment was disproportionate to the offense. 528 journalists, including about 200 current and former Herald staffers, called on the Herald to reinstate DeFede, but the paper's management refused to back down. The state attorney's office later declined to file charges against the columnist, holding that the potential violation was "without a victim or a complainant."
On September 8, 2006, the Miami Heralds president Jesús Díaz Jr. fired three journalists because they had allegedly been paid by the United States government to work for anti-Cuba propaganda TV and radio channels. The three were Pablo Alfonso, Wilfredo Cancio Isla and Olga Connor. Less than a month later, responding to pressure from the Cuban community in Miami, Díaz resigned after reinstating the fired journalists, saying that "policies prohibiting such behavior were ambiguously communicated, inconsistently applied and widely misunderstood over many years." Nevertheless, he continued to state that such payments, especially if made from organs of the state, violate the principles of journalistic independence. At least seven other journalists who did not work at the Herald, namely Miguel Cossio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Juan Manuel Cao, Ariel Remos, Omar Claro, Helen Aguirre Ferre, Paul Crespo, and Ninoska Perez-Castellón, were also paid for programs on Radio Martí or TV Martí, both financed by the government of the United States through the Broadcasting Board of Governors, receiving a total of between 15,000 and 175,000 since 2001.
In May 2011, the paper announced it had sold of Biscayne Bayfront land surrounding its headquarters in the Arts & Entertainment District of Downtown Miami for $236million, to a Malaysian resort developer, Genting Malaysia Berhad. McClatchy announced that the Herald and El Nuevo Herald would be moving to another location by 2013. In May 2013, the paper moved to a new building in suburban Doral. The old building was demolished in 2014.
In November 2018, the Herald broke the story that "in 2007, despite substantial evidence that corroborated stories of abuse by Jeffrey Epstein| Epstein, the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, signed off on a secret deal for the multimillionaire, one that ensured he would never spend a day in prison." Thus, the full extent of Epstein's crimes and his collaborators remained hidden and the victims unaware of this arrangement. In July 2019, Epstein was charged with sex trafficking dozens of minors between 2002 and 2005; reporting at the time noted how the Herald brought public attention to accusations against Epstein.
On December 17, 2019, it was announced the Miami Herald would move to a six-days-a-week format.
On January 21, 2020, it was announced that the Miami Herald would close its Doral printing plant and move its printing and packaging operations to the South Florida Sun Sentinel printing facilities in Deerfield Beach. The Herald stopped printing its own editions as of April 26, 2020.
In 2023, the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald laid off six workers, the worst round of job cuts to the newspaper's news staff since 2019. That same year, the Miami Herald named Alex Mena the newspaper's executive director. He began working at the newspaper at the age of 19 and became the Miami Herald
The average daily circulation of the Herald, which was 440,225 as recently as 1998, had fallen to 12,623 by August 2024. Paid digital circulation had reached 44,011, but fell to 30,840 in 2023.