Where the cuts are coming from

I was looking for any fallout from the Herald Ombudsman's reaction to a blog post by sports reporter/columnist Armando Salguero and ran into this column from several days ago in which Schumacher-Matos details the layoffs at 1 Herald Plaza.

The relevant excerpts:

The 347 current newsroom staff will be reduced by about 40 people, [Herald Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal] said. Most of the cuts will be in management, supervisors, copy editors, photographers and the like. Only about 6 of the 125 reporters will be let go, he said.

The Web, Neighbors, Broward County and investigative staffs remain largely intact, reflecting what the publisher and editor consider important for The Miami Herald's future. Latin American coverage will continue to be seen as part of the paper's ''franchise,'' too, with roughly the same staffing and space, Gyllenhaal said.

Staffing at El Nuevo Herald, which has seen its circulation go up while the English paper's has gone down, will be reduced by 9 employees from a staff of 70, though the two editions will share photographers now. The sharing of some content between the two newspapers will continue to grow, Gyllenhaal said.

Eleven jobs will be outsourced. Archiving, calendar listings and the International Edition will be done now in India, for example, while the six staffers who currently do The Miami Herald's programming on WLRN Radio will be transferred to a new, third-party company.

State coverage in Tallahassee and outside the paper's core distribution area of Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties will be reduced by two positions, a trend across the country. Two other positions, classical music and at-large cultural critics may also go. Cultural criticism is arguably important to the community's economic growth. ''We don't yet know how this will end up, but it's a good example of an area of coverage that is very important, and must be in the paper one way or another,'' Gyllenhaal said.

Implementing a universal copy-editing desk and standardizing design templates for inside pages will create internal efficiency that readers may not notice, though I fear that the cuts in copy editors and supervisors treads dangerously on maintaining quality control. Editors keep reporters, especially young ones, in check.

This answers the question of what was happening at the Herald's red-headed step child, El Nuevo Herald.

Where the cuts are coming from

McClatchy Watch has a running tally on the numbers of employees to be laid off at each McClatchy paper.

Not surprisingly, the Miami Herald leads the list with 250. What's not clear thus far is how many of the 250 (if any) are coming out of El Nuevo Herald.

Herald circ. continues to plummet - UPDATED

The Audit Bureau of Circulations report on newspaper circulations for the six-month period that ended on March 31st is out and the news is ugly for the Miami Herald.

The Miami Herald reported daily circulation lost more than 11% with 240,223 copies while Sunday dropped 9% to 311,245.

Meanwhile the news wasn't as bad for El Nuevo Herald.

El Nuevo Herald, the sibling of The Miami Herald, reported weekday circulation slipped 1.3% to 79,963. Sunday circ was off 2% to 88,035.

I have heard reports that not many Herald Employees have opted for the buyout the company is offering which consists of 75% of the employee's salary for one year.

On the share price front, McClatchy closed today at $10.50 which is somewhat better than the all-time low of $7.93 on a week ago but abysmal compared to the 52-week high of $34.32 and the $44 dollar range the stock traded at in October of 2006.

UPDATE: Anonymous commenter says that the details of the buyouts are different than what I had heard:

The buyout offer is two weeks' salary for each year of service, up to six months' salary. There's also an insurance option - full coverage for three months, or no coverage but additional payout, or longer coverage with a smaller payout.

McClatchy inks Hispanic deal with ImpreMedia

From the ImpreMedia Press Release:

ImpreMedia, the No.1 Hispanic news and information company in the U.S. in online and print, today announced agreements with the Spanish-language publications of The McClatchy Company that will create the largest online and print advertising platform in the nation serving the Hispanic market. The platform will allow National advertisers to obtain significant penetration in 18 top U.S. Hispanic markets including nine of the Top 10 Hispanic markets.

Promising an efficient one-stop solution to reach 18 top U.S. Hispanic markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Fort Worth/Dallas, Houston, Chicago, the Central Valley of California and San Francisco, the companies will work collaboratively with each other to offer advertisers an effective way to reach a National Hispanic audience unmatched by any other Hispanic marketing vehicle. The parties will leverage their complementary strengths in offering the new platform to the marketplace and support it through their individual sales, marketing and production departments.

“McClatchy is very pleased to be involved in this innovative network. Our Spanish-language products bring great audience reach to the equation, and we look forward to offering our advertisers a national buy,” said Frank Whittaker, McClatchy Vice President of Operations.

McClatchy’s participating Spanish-language publications include El Nuevo Herald in South Florida, La Estrella in Fort Worth/Dallas, Texas, and Vida en el Valle, which serves the California communities of Fresno, Merced, Modesto, Sacramento and Stockton.

H/T: Jose and Los Miquis de Miami

Double Standard at the Heralds?

Although MSNBC published an investigative piece about journalists who donated to political campaigns and the investigation has turned up one Miami Herald copy editor who violated a company policy against such contributions, the Herald itself has remained silent on the matter. At least if you search their web site you will find no story about it.

This is in stark contrast to the actions of last September when the Herald found out that another newspaper was investigating El Nuevo Herald journalists that were also freelancing for Radio and TV Marti, also in violation of the company's policies. In that instance, the Herald rushed an Oscar Corral story to press that was shocking in its tone as well as its sloppiness. The aftermath of the scandal left the two newsrooms (ENH and TMH) as divided as ever and finished the career of the Herald's then publisher, Jesus Diaz Jr.

Now both of these policies (the one against political campaign contributions, and the one against freelancing for government-funded media) are intended to protect the integrity of the MHMC.

I'm wondering why then the Herald hasn't mentioned the most recent violation. I guess the difference is that the violation this time around was by a TMH employee and not an ENH employee.

Heralds in uncharted territory with "Cuba Puzzle"

TMH and ENH are collaborating on a series of of reports about Cuba that the MHMC is collectively calling "The Cuba Puzzle." The project is significant in several ways. First of all it seems that early into the tenure of Anders Gyllenhaal that there is an effort to heal the rift between the two papers, particularly on the subject of Cuba where ENH has often led and TMH has not followed.

It's also significant because of the considerable online component that includes several videos. It's as if MHMC is finally realizing that the days of the old fishwrap are done and that they truly are starting to embrace their role as a "new media" company.

And lastly, by sneaking reporters into the island to get coverage without official recognition from the regime, the Herald is proving to the other MSM outlets that you don't need to make a faustian bargain with Fidel Castro to get the news out of Cuba. The result is some truly candid statements by Cubans on the street. The kind that seem to evade the officially recognized MSM outlets on the island like Reuters and CNN. I should also take a moment to recognize the recent reporting that the Miami New Times did, also with an "under the radar" journalist posing as tourist.

What gets reported and in what language?

Chuck Strouse, the editor of the Miami New Times brings something to the attention of Herald Watch in a blog post today.

Over the last several days TMH has published a series of stories about Radio/TV Martí and their parent organization, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB). The stories allege shady financial dealings, cronyism at the organization and a lack of balance in the programs transmitted by its broadcasters.

The thing is that ENH has not published any of these stories or the details found in them.

Herald Watch readers already know that one of the big problems at MHMC, as I see it, is the lack of coordination between the two papers. The standard fall-back argument from executives at the company is that the two papers are independent of each other, with their own editors and editorial boards. And I suppose there is some merit to the idea, particularly because it gives ENH freedom to report stories that are more important to its target audience instead of being merely a translation shop.

In the past I have advocated for some sort of liaison editor that would bring be able to introduce important stories into one paper that originated in the other.

In this particular case it appears that ENH has been reluctant to run the stories that attack OCB because of the fallout from the Martí Moonlighters affair in which ENH lost a significant number of subscribers when it published a controversal piece by TMH reporter Oscar Corral.

The Corral story resulted in the firing and subsequent re-hiring of 3 ENH journalists for supposed ethics violations because they moonlighted for OCB. Cuban-Americans, which make up a good proportion of ENH's readership, have fond feelings for the idea of Radio/TV Martí if not their results. Many Cubans were outraged by the attacks on Radio/TV Martí and defended the implicated journalists.

But it doesn't look good that now ENH has, to date, decided to avoid publishing the articles (many penned by Corral himself) about the alleged irregularities at OCB in a form of "soft self-censorship."

It should be noted that TMH did engage in its fair share of "soft censorship" during the Martí Moonlighters scandal by not running many articles or columns (in the days subsequent to the intitial Corral report) that could have provided more balance to the story. Many times when such an article or column did run in TMH it was days after ENH published it.