Miami News Blog

At Northwestern University, there's a remarkable student-led initiative called the Innocence Project. Since 1991, the J-school program has helped free 11 wrongfully convicted men with good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting on the flawed cases.

via Illinois Dept. of Corrections

Anthony McKinney

​In the case of Anthony McKinney, sentenced to life over a 1978 shotgun killing, it looked like they had a 12th.

One of South Florida's leading serious gay news sources, South Florida Blade, has shut down, according to reports. Its owner, Window Media LLC, which is the largest publisher of gay newspapers in the nation, has abruptly closed all of its titles.

Originally founded in 2000 as the Express Gay News, it was bought by Window Media in 2003. The name was changed to South Florida Blade, styled after sister paper Washington Blade. The paper was edited by Dan Renzi, an occasional New Times contributor and former cast member of The Real World: Miami.

Also shut down is the paper's slutty little corporate sister, 411 magazine, a listings/dudes-in-underwear glossy.

Update: Apparently, 411 will live on as Mark's List Magazine. Multimedia Platforms LLC bought 50 percent of the popular gay website, JumpOnMarksList.com (which our sister paper in Fort Lauderdale named Best Locally Generated Website in 2008), last week, and has taken on the staff of 411, which will now be a bi-weekly publication. But 411 is primarily an event listings mag, whose most recent cover might be a little too racy to publish even on Riptide, and won't make up for the journalistic voice lost when the Blade went kaput.

​CNN's Rick Sanchez was in extreme overshare mode last night on Twitter. Apparently a combination of not being picked to replace Lou Dobbs and flying to FIU parents' weekend to see his son had him feeling emotional, a bit edgy, and finally confessional, admitting to something we've long known: He was a bit of an airbag during his days behind the WSVN desk.

"when i was a local anchor in miami, i was so clueless. funny how years can make you get life. i know so much more now," tweeted Sanchez [we left the capitalization to preserve the tweet-tegrity]

That's not news to New Times. He was our favorite TV punching bag back in the day. We even created a "Best Of" award category for him: Least Credible News Personality.

But Sanchez has redeemed himself a bit since then. He's a Twitter pioneer, after all. And his 3 p.m. CNN broadcast is one of the few, if only, shows on the channel that beats both MSNBC and Fox News. Apparently that wasn't good enough to get him Lou Dobbs's recently vacated slot.

One Twitter detractor said Sanchez might have gotten the job if he wasn't so liberally biased. "then i don't want the job," Sanchez replied.

Sanchez had mentioned his son in a tweet, and another follower asked him if he's in legal trouble.

"what a stupid question," Sanchez bluntly replied.

After Sanchez tweeted, "i was so poor as kid, my son so rich. i want to make him hungry like old man," another follower asked if he had to walk to school in the snow.

"no, walked to school in miami dumb ass. no snow. but my dad made me wear hard soled shoes, no jeans and long sleeve shirt," Sanchez replied.

via Fox News

​Well, this is just delightful. In fact, Riptide would like to nominate this video for Best Unintentionally Funny Clip of the Week.

We don't want to give too much away. No, no. It would spoil the climax. But let's just say you can count on the following (in chronological order):

1. A pushy Fox News reporter.
2. An abortion doc from Miami.
3. Yelling.
4. Broken objects.
5. A mustache!

Can you think of a more entertaining situation? Ever? OK, maybe if there were also a mud-wrestling pit. And some whip-its. But, you know, other than that.

Just weeks after much too much of Florida's political establishment and media took a dumb Crist/Rubio remix of an old YouTube meme way too seriously, there's another stupid YouTube video that certain journalists, it seems, are forcibly trying to turn into a controversy. 

via The V Files

​Considering Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin now gets his own right-wing political column every other week, is it asking too much that he keeps pointed, half-baked political theory out of his television reviews? Because all too often the man's words come off seeming ridiculous.

After deciding to attack the National Park Service and nature itself a few weeks ago, Garvin sunk his teeth into the Obama administration while nominally reviewing ABC's new alien show V.

ABC's series takes aim not at a German dictator from the misty past but a sitting -- and popular -- U.S. president. From the fawning reaction of the news media (sample press-conference question to V [Ed: alien visitors who are actually evil space lizards or something] leader Anna: "Is there such a thing as an ugly visitor?") to the recruiting of human supporters into an alien front group that could easily be mistaken for "community organizing," the parallels to Obama are unmistakable.

But what says actress Morena Baccarin who plays Anna?

"I don't think we're saying Anna is President Obama," she tells i09.

Well then.

It's definitely with in line, if not expected, to comment on any political subtext in a television show, but Garvin all too often crosses the line by making that subtext fit his own personal partisan political views, and attacks those programs that don't. Not only does it come off as a whack job, but also a hack job.

jacco.org via Flickr CC

Editors, shmeditors.

​On the opinion page of the Miami Herald , Patricia Kawaja's letter begins dramatically. "I am alarmed by Tomas Regalado's election as mayor of Miami," she blasts. "Another Cobwebbed politician...."

Only that's not what she actually wrote. When the British-born writer-by-trade sent her letter in earlier this week, it read: "Another Cobwebbed Cuban." Yesterday morning she opened the paper and found the word had been changed. Kawaja now claims her letter was slashed because there's a significant population of Cuban writers and editors at the daily paper. (which by the way is true -- new Metro editor, new senior editor for news, for intance.) It's a freedom of speech issue, she says. "The Herald is constantly sucking up to Cubans. I have never been so livid."

"We want the media to do its job. To start doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is investigating, reporting, asking the right questions. You turn on the media right now and what you hear  is stories about who shot who, houses of filth. Trivial stuff. Fluff," Bichachi says. "We're not able to know what's going on in municipalities, in the county, what commissioners are up to, what mayors are up to. All we hear is insignificant stories." 

​They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. We haven't been quite this flattered in a very long time.

Three weeks ago, Riptide published a story about the very drastic fall of former pro basketball player Rumeal Robinson. We used court documents filed in Miami-Dade court and a revealing interview with Robinson's brother, Donald Barrows, to show how a guy could end up virtually homeless and under indictment for financial crimes after a lucrative NBA career.

The short answer: strippers.

This Sunday, the Boston Globe published its own story about the extent of Robinson's decline. We knew Globe scribe Brian MacQuarrie was working on one, because he called three times asking for the location of the documents we used and for Barrows's phone number. Still, we were a bit surprised to find a virtual Xerox of our article reprinted in the Boston daily, with slight wording changes. But don't take our word for it: After the jump, judge for yourself.

​For the first time in its 15-year history, the National Circle of Journalists from Cuba did not give out an award recognizing a heroic colleague on the mainland when they commemorated Cuban Journalist Day on October 25.

It wasn't that reporters on the island were no longer risking arrest by stealthily passing information to a foreign correspondent. Or that there weren't still those posting anonymous blogs on the tightly State-controlled Internet. Or even that mimeographed dispatches were no longer being surreptitiously distributed.

The problem, group leaders say, was that the circle couldn't contact any of the candidates to inform them they would be winning an award that could place them "at great risk."

"There is a repressive wave in Cuba that has risen," says Jose R. Carreño, the group's president and a former political prisoner under the Castro regime. "We tried to make contact through various means."

P.S. Silicon Beach? Where have I heard that before?

​​Here's news you won't be reading in The Miami Herald*: the daily, once the largest in Florida, has now shrunk to third in the state based on circulation, according to numbers released yesterday by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The Herald had settled into the number two slot behind The St. Petersburg Times, but now is also bested by The Orlando Sentinel.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel was fourth. The Herald now only outsells its Broward rival by fewer than 10,000 copies a day.

The Herald moved about 162,260 copies on weekdays between April and September of this year, down from 210,884 during the same period last year. That's a nearly 50,000-copy drop (or 23 percent), one of the greatest circulation declines in the country. On average, the circulation for dailies across the nation fell by 10.6 percent.

To give you an idea of how drastic the drop is historically, In 1950, the year The Herald won its first Pultizer Prize and the population of Miami-Dade was only about 495,000, the paper had a daily circulation of 170,000. Of course, that was in those long-gone pre-Internet times when the daily paper business model actually made sense.

*We're not saying the Herald wouldn't publish it, but if they did would you actually be reading it?

To some, Barra da Tijuca is Rio de Janeiro's hottest new neighborhood, blessed with beautiful rock formations and a beach blanketed with some of the planet's sexiest bodies. To others, it is a Brazilian version of the worst of Miami, full of traffic jams and tacky shopping malls.

And the "good":Do you hear that? More Miami-like than Miami? How is that even possible? It's like this entire city has turned its own reputation into a giant, fake, uber-branded, easy-to-stereotype dreamland that can't even live up to its own hype. Oh wait -- that's exactly what's happened.

Back in March, New Times proclaimed the death of the SunPost, Miami Beach's scrappy and once impressive weekly rag.

​If we didn't turn out to be precisely right -- a few stray copies of all-but-content-free issues are still appearing from time to time around Lincoln Road -- we were pretty damn close.

The SunPost's site has completely disappeared from the web, and several of its former staffers have started a new, impressively designed paper called the Lead that's now filling the SunPost's niche around the Beach.

Since then, life has apparently gone from bad to worse for longtime SunPost publisher Jeannette Stark. Stark's husband, Felix, created the SunPost in 1985, and her son, Andrew Stark, shepherded it through the paper's best years.

Riptide has learned that this past August, Stark filed for bankruptcy. And according to her filings, she owed more than $1 million to creditors -- and listed only $250 in assets. 

Stark also faces four civil cases in Miami-Dade Court, including two from banks and one from the paper's Hialeah printer.

​It seems WTVJ's Julia Yarbough really is packing up her gym bags. SFLTV reports that Tuesday will be the news anchor's last day after more than a decade at the station. Yarbough isn't leaving for a cushier gig at another station; she plans to get a master's degree in international business and a personal training certification.

After Dwight Lauderdale's retirement last year from WPLG, Yarbough became the most prominent African-American anchor in South Florida. Her exit might leave us without an African-American anchor in prime time at a major station for the first time in more than two decades.

She's also the latest in a string of high-profile talent to leave WTVJ. Joel Connable was fired earlier this year, and longtime on-air talent Kelly Craig left in June.

via

​Artlurker caused quite the brouhaha yesterday by publishing a fake interview about an artist who was constructing a "rape tunnel," in which he promised to rape anyone who made it through. 

​It should give you a sense of my early-morning brain-dead-ness that while reading through the "art" section of my Google Reader, I browsed through a post from locally focused art blog ArtLurker about a "rape tunnel," only to be disappointed to find it was not actually about Miami or a Miami artist without thinking, Wait. WTF, a rape tunnel?

Well, Gawker ran with the story today, before realizing it might not actually be a story at all.

The post purported to interview an artist named Richard Whitehurst, who was planning on pulling off an exhibition in Ohio with this mission statement:

I've constructed a 22 ft tunnel out of plywood that leads into the project room. There is no way in or out of the project room except for this tunnel. As you travel through the tunnel, it gets smaller and smaller, making it so that you have to crawl and put yourself in a submissive position in order to reach the tunnel's destination. At the end of the tunnel the subject will find me waiting in the project room and I'll try to the best of my ability to overpower and rape the person who crawls through.

Problem is, Google turns up nothing on Whitehurst; the author, Sheila Zareno; curator Caroline Miffen; any of the art galleries mentioned, including William Strunk Jr. Museum of Contemporary Art (Strunk is the co-author of The Elements of Style, by the way); Alexandria Asheton Gallery; Seward Projects Space; Akron Culture Committee; and the 4D Gallery in Columbus.

I guess it's possible the entire Ohio art scene, if such a thing actually exists, has somehow stayed off the Internet, but not likely. To make matters fishier, ArtLurker has gone completely offline (we'll paste the original piece after the jump, at least until ArtLurker comes back online).

Update: A visit to the site reveals the hosting account has been suspended.

The picture of the purported "rape tunnel" included in the post actually comes from this site, and is a wind tunnel. So yeah, verdict: Bullshit.

But wait, is it art?

​Now that Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin is allowed to air his libertarian views once in a while in a separate column, you'd think he'd stop hiding them in his boob tube reviews. Boy, would you be wrong, you satanist tree hugger.

Garvin sinks into Ken Burns's The National Parks: America's Best Idea with the glee of a loon looking for "Paul Is Dead" messages in Beatles songs, but in this case, it seems, he's trying to prove national parks are part of some sort of liberal, anti-Christian conspiracy theory.

The funny thing is that Garvin heavily criticizes Burns for going on and on and on and on and on about biased nonsense, which would also be a suitable criticism for the column itself. 

Illustration by Kyle T. Webster

​Yesterday, I received a letter from a sociologist who lives in the high-rise 500 Brickell. The tenant reports that this past Saturday, a young man jumped from the luxury building. It's the 17th case in Miami-Dade since the condo boom of 2007.

The email begins, "I happen to live in a brand-new Brickell high-rise and JUST this past Saturday a young man in his mid-late 20s jumped off the 36th floor of my building right on my line (I live on the 15th floor. We saw the police tape, gurney, and I got a slight glance of the body (my heart stopped). I didn't see media or too much 'action'. In a matter of minutes, everything was cleaned up and it was as if nothing had ever happened. I searched the internet, but could not find anything. I wanted to write to you because I have been very disturbed about the whole thing and because I really don't know anyone else who has the interest you have in this topic. I mean, what drove this person to do this? The age-old question! He passed right before by unit -- was it when I got up to go to the kitchen? What if I was sitting on my balcony playing with my daughter like I usually do? I can't seem to erase this from my mind."

It continues, "I don't know if you are familiar with the building, but it's a gorgeous, posh building that's about a year old and most of the tenants are young professionals.

An interesting thing I learned from my colleagues is that the media doesn't usually report suicides because of the sensationalism and the copycats. Then you have the case of the Coral Gables High teen who got [stabbed] last week and all the copycats who took weapons to school the next day. Now why do you think the media reports this, NON-STOP? That's sensationalism if I ever saw it! As a researcher, I am very interested in knowing what happened in my building."

Natalie McNeal: The one true frugalista?

In February 2008, then-Herald writer Natalie McNeal challenged herself to not spend a single dollar that month. That spawned her semi-popular Herald blog, the Frugalista Files.

McNeal might be the diva of pinching pennies, but there's one expense she's not scrimping on lately: lawyer fees.

McNeal trademarked frugalista in 2008 and has sent out at least one cease-and-desist order to another blog using a similar moniker.

But some people aren't so sure McNeal can lay claim to the term, even if she did register a trademark. From US News:

Trademarks usually protect terms that are distinctive -- that is, they should be widely associated with the person who holds the trademark. But in the case of "frugalista," it is so widely used that it is hard to imagine how McNeal can argue that the term applies singularly to her, especially considering that she started her blog in 2008, well after the word was popular. The First Amendment, after all, protects the fair use of words, even if one person would like to claim exclusivity. (McNeal seems to have big plans for the word; her trademark application mentions cable television shows and motion pictures. She has not yet responded to my e-mail about the issue, but I hope she does, because I would love to include her perspective.)

McNeal's lawyer clarifies that the word frugalista can still be uttered or written by non-McNeals, but believes McNeal is the only person who can legally identify herself as such.

screencap via CBS4

​Apparently, Mayor Carlos Alvarez didn't think the budget meeting would pack enough drama into his day, so he decided to schedule an early-afternoon news conference yesterday to call out the Miami Herald. You can watch the nearly hour-long proceedings on CBS4's website.

"I think we should start taking really more advice from the Herald. This is an organization that has a virtual monopoly in Miami-Dade County and is going bankrupt. How can you do that? Poor leadership. Poor planing. Bad business model. Bad employees. How can you have a monopoly and be going bankrupt? But we're to follow their idea of Public Administration 101. OK," Alvarez quipped.

Why so angry, Alvarez? The mayor contended that yesterday's front-page story about pay raises handed to police majors was biased and timed with the budget hearing to whip people into a frenzy. He also stated that the issue was old news, because he had given an interview on the matter to Channel 41 four weeks ago. We can't speak to the Herald's choice of timing, but Alvarez must know that giving an interview to a Spanish-language channel that's far from first in the ratings doesn't absolve the issue from further coverage. Especially in the English-language media.

  This is a bit of a leftover from yesterday, but a reporter from the Tribune Co.-owned WSFL was trying to get an interview with the father of a Coral Gables High student in the wake of Tuesday's stabbing. His daughter is allegedly the girl who the two boys were fighting over. The man answers the reporter's question with a swift kick to the stomach.

Violence is never the answer, but you have to figure something like this is going to happen once in a while when you shove cameras in the faces of people who are probably going through a bit of an emotional shock. [h/t to SFLTV]

Hannah Giles -- the 20-year-old FIU journalism student, minister's daughter, and fake hooker who, along with an accomplice, exposed some ACORN offices' habits of offering business advice to pimps and hoes -- is garnering praise from Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and even Jon Stewart.

Giles and a male accomplice, posing as a prostitute and a pimp, visited four (yes, four) ACORN offices and asked for legal advice -- which they received. In a Baltimore office, a worker told them to list their occupation as "performance artists" on their tax returns and even went as far as to tell them to claim as dependents 13 underage Central American girls that the two pretended they were illegally bringing into the country to work as prostitutes.

Yesterday, from his Miami techno-hermit compound, Matt Drudge decided to run with "White Student Beaten on School Bus; Crowd Cheers," as the top story on his website in all its race-baiting glory. 

​It's been a busy few weeks for Niche Media overlord Jason Binn. When he wasn't buying a $1.6 million two-bedroom apartment in Continuum on South Beach, he was dashing the hopes and dreams of inner-city schoolchildren. Or so a lawsuit claims.  According to a lawsuit filed by Powers today, Binn and Niche Media threatened legal action against the magazine -- designed to empower inner-city school kids, mind you -- because when Power sold OD, he signed a no-compete clause. 

​The Miami Dolphins continue their embarrassing march toward all things ridiculously South Florida stereotypical and cheesy. 

via SmashFit.com

​We've got an idea that just might save NBC6 from ratings hell: Replace one of its news broadcasts with a weekly reality show capturing all the behind-the-scenes drama that must go on there. 

​As GossipCop reminds us, today is the two-year anniversary of Fidel Castro's death. Well, the two-year anniversary of when Perez Hilton declared him dead, by doodling the word dead over the dictator's wrinkled forehead, in his trademark MS Paint white. 

via Random Pixels

The offending image on Random Pixels.

​Classic David and Goliath: Small local blogger criticizes big, powerful daily newspaper. Daily newspaper doesn't like it and sends a cease-and-desist order even though when the local blogger gave the daily praise, it found no problem with that. This is basically the drama unfolding between local blogger Bill Cooke of Random Pixels and the Miami Herald.

Earlier this week, Cooke wrote a post taking a jab at the Herald's photographs at Monday night's Dolphins game. In it, he "praised" photog Charles Trainor Jr. for "resisting the temptation to keep his lens focused on the field for the entire game." He also gave Joe Rimkus Jr. an honorable mention for "crafting a splendid caption." In the post, he used the original photographs from the Herald's site along with proper credit.

This is not a particularly unusual post for Cooke. He has lifted photos from the daily before, the most recognizable time being when staff photographer Patrick Farrell covered the aftermath of Hurricane Ike in Haiti and his subsequent Pulitzer Prize win.

However, the criticism of the earlier post might have rubbed the Herald the wrong way. Cooke received the following email from director of site operations Suzanne Levinson:

Sid Rosenberg

​Sid Rosenberg says what's on his mind, even if it's controversial. The former Don Imus sidekick was a bit too hot to handle for 790 the Ticket and left that station in March. Now he's back, with a midday show that begins September 7 on 560 WQAM. 

​Bitchy celebrity blogger Perez Hilton made a name for himself drawing cocaine boogers on photos of movie stars. That, and spreading hateful -- OK, kind of hilarious -- morsels of Hollywood gossip. So, what in hell is he doing on the August cover of The Advocate?