Memo from Gyllenhaal to Newsroom Staff

From: Gyllenhaal, Anders - Miami
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2008 9:46 AM
To: MIA Newsroom
Subject: Important newsroom announcement....

This is to follow up the announcement this morning about the cost reductions at McClatchy newspapers across the country. For The Herald newsroom, this will mean a series of steps, including buyouts, reorganization of several departments, a leaner management and an expansion of outsourcing.

These changes will be difficult and will have impact on much of what we do. In putting together plans that will be detailed in a series of meetings today, we have tried to preserve our strengths and spread the reductions across all departments and disciplines. We have looked at new ways of doing some things, and will revamp some departments. As a result, the newsroom's plans are a complex series of moves that take some time to explain.

The details will be outlined at staff meetings today at 11 a.m. in the training room on the sixth floor, 1 p.m. in the Pines office, and 4 p.m. again in the training room. Starting in the early afternoon, we'll also hold sessions for departments and small groups to explain the buyouts, which will first be made on an optional basis and then an involuntary basis. Emails will go out this morning to anyone who should attend. For those unable to make any of these sessions, there will be a number of ways to get the information you need, which are explained below.

Here is the list of meetings for today and tomorrow:
Who should attend Time Place Led by

Monday
For all:
General staff meeting 11 a.m. 6th Floor Training Room Anders
Broward staff meeting 1 p.m. Pines, 1st Floor Conf. Room Dave, Pat
General staff meeting 4 p.m. 6th Floor Training Room Anders
Open Q&A session 7 p.m. 6th Floor training Room Anders

For groups:
World editors Noon Miller Conference Room John, Rick
Photo editors 12:30 p.m. Knight Conference Room Liza, Luis
Features editors 1 p.m. Miller Conference Room Rick, Mindy
All other eligible S1,2&3s 1 p.m. 6th Floor Training Room Anders
Photographer 3s 1:15 p.m Knight Conference Room Liza, Luis
Features critics 1:30 p.m. Miller Conference Room Rick,Mindy
Systems 2 p.m. Liza's office Liza, Mike
Reporter 1&2s 2 p.m. 6th Floor Training Room Anders
Wireroom 2:30 p.m. Miller Conference Room Liza
Designer 1 group 3 p.m. Knight Conference Room Liza, Eddie
Sports supervisors 3 p.m. Jorge Rojas' office Rick
Sports clerk/reporters 3:30 p.m. Jorge Rojas' office Rick
International edition 3:30 p.m. International office Liza
Copy editors 5 p.m. 6th Floor Training Room Liza, Jeff
All other eligible S1, 2&3s 5 p.m. Knight Conference Room Anders,Dave
Reporter 1&2s 6 p.m. 6th Floor Training Room Anders, Dave

Tuesday
Department heads 9:30 a.m. Knight Conference Room Anders
Open Q&A session 11:30 a.m. Miller Conference Room Anders
Conference call 1 p.m. Miller Conference Room Anders (for staffers out of town)
Open Q&A session 6 p.m. Miller Conference Room Anders

These next few weeks will be some of the most difficult and emotional that our newsroom has faced. We will do our best to work through these changes at the same time as we try to keep our focus on our work.

There is going to be confusion and uncertainty at points. If you have questions about any elements of this plan, ask your supervisor, or the managing editor for your department. You can also ask, call or email Michelle Ashman at any point this week if you need immediate information about where to be and other specifics. Once more, at the end of each day - 7 p.m. today and 6 p.m. the rest of the week - we'll have an open-ended session for any and all questions or issues

Your local news...

...assembled in New Delhi

The Miami Herald has announced that it will be outsourcing certain job functions to India.

The Miami Herald is outsourcing copyediting of a weekly community news section and some advertising production work to India, a newspaper editor said Friday.

Starting in January, copyediting and design in a weekly section of Broward County community news and other special advertising sections will be outsourced to Mindworks, based in New Delhi.

The project remains in the testing phase, so it was unclear if or how jobs in south Florida will be affected, executive editor Anders Gyllenhaal said.

In terms of ad production, one can only see any outsourcing by the Herald as a step up since the paper has routinely shown that it has no sense of good design whatsoever.

And to think I almost missed this line in the Canadian Press article:

Mindworks will also monitor reader comments posted to online stories, he said.

I wonder what guidelines the Herald will give it's new vendor in India. If they are anything like the current guidelines they would most certainly permit hateful and outrageous remarks as long as they are about Cubans. Such remarks when made about blacks, Jews or any other racial ethnic or religious group are not permitted.

H/T: Daniel in Garanhuns

The perfect storm gathers on reader comments at Herald.com

On October 29th I sent the following email to the Herald's new Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos.

Dear Mr. Schumacher-Matos,

I was wondering why the Herald continues to tolerate hateful comments on the herald.com web site. Take a look at the following:

http://pod01.prospero.com/dir-app/acx/ACDispatch.aspx?webtag=kr-miamitm&action=message&msg=16057

Is it journalistically wrong for the Herald to moderate comments using some minimum standard?

Perhaps removing the anonymity of the commenters will raise the level of civility and the quality of the discussion.

It's a shame that the comments section on important news stories has become a repository for insults and something to be avoided rather than read.

What are your thoughts?

Henry Louis Gomez

The comments I referenced were attached to an article about a prominent Miami attorney, Joe Zumpano, who located and helped facilitate the rescue of a group of Cuban refugees. Many of the comments were blatantly anti-Cuban and simply there to inflame rather than impart any sort of perspective to the situation.

On November 4th I posted about a Herald piece that reported complaints lodged by the NAACP about racist reader comments. At the time, the paper's executive editor, Anders Gyllenhaal, was quoted as saying the following:

Gyllenhaal said the newspaper takes a number of steps to monitor and shape the tone of comments while still allowing ''the kind of wide-open debate'' that online postings enable.

Here at Herald Watch, I challenged that assertion:

Gyllenhaal's statement is a lie. Racist and tasteless comments are the norm at Herald.com.

[...]

I think the real issue has to do with money. You need to pay someone to sit there and moderate comments. You also need to have a policy that's clear as to what's acceptable and what's not. The Herald has shown an incredible unwillingness to commit to a coherent online strategy...

During the early hours of Monday November 26th, pro football player Sean Taylor was shot in his Miami-area home and subsequently died. The Herald articles written in the aftermath of the murder were magnets to precisely the kind of comments I challenged the Ombudsman about a month before.

About that time, someone began posting comments to the Herald's articles using my name, Henry Gomez. Needless to say I didn't like the idea that someone might be confused and think I actually was the author of those comments. I was asked by an acquaintance and my own mother if the comments were mine. Naturally I followed the protocol to have the comments removed after the fact and also lodged a complaint to Rick Hirsch, managing editor for multimedia and new projects at the Herald. We reached an agreement that would prevent people from impersonating me, but that didn't solve the overall problem.

In a column today, Schumacher-Matos finally takes on the issue of anonymous and inflammatory reader comments and quotes me.

There are several things to note. For one it seems that Schumacher-Matos is finally taking a side in an argument, coming down in favor of some sort of controls to the comments section.

...as The Miami Herald feels its way forward, it can't shirk its responsibility to impose rules that benefit the overwhelming number of us as readers and as citizens.

But Schumacher-Matos mistakenly characterizes this as a battle between comment moderation and increased online readership.

The number of visitors to MiamiHerald.com in November was up 66 percent from the year before, according to Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal, and registration might slow or even temporarily reverse such strong growth.

There's a fallacious cause and effect argument here that somehow attributes the Herald's increased web traffic to unmoderated and anonymous comments. I suspect it has more to do with changing preferences of consumers who would rather receive their news for free and electronically rather than pay for a clumsy fishwrap. The most widely read blog I write for, Babalu, moderates comments and our readership has grown dramatically in spite of that. That's because people come to read what the contributors write not necessarily what the readers write. It's my belief that most Herald.com readers are not even aware of the reader comments and that many who are have stopped looking at them because their hateful and offensive nature. Basically, the Herald has abdicated control of part of its web site to a small band of bigots and liars.

In any case it seems that the situation, which the Herald should have foreseen and should have reacted to earlier has finally become unbearable:

The Miami Herald and its parent company, McClatchy, are working on requiring simple registration before readers can comment in the site. Features editor Shelley Acoca has just been reassigned to a new position as ''reader exchange editor,'' and one of her first assignments, says Hirsch, will be to study how better to monitor and encourage reader comments.

These are two basic steps that should have been taken some time ago. What a revolutionary idea: make sure that people are who they say they are and set a clearly defined standard for what is acceptable in the form of online reader comments similar to those used in publishing letters to the editor. How can the Herald accept all the increased web traffic, and the corresponding ad revenue without taking on the financial responsibility to control the quality of what readers will be exposed to?

Schumacher-Matos gets it right when he says:

What all this means is that The Miami Herald should do what The New York Times has recently done: Bite the budget bullet to hire editors to review comments before they are posted, especially for stories most likely to attract offenders.

Bite the bullet indeed. As the dead-tree version of the Herald shrivels and dies, Herald.com is going to have to be more forward-thinking because the online world is far more competitive. Whatever happens, I'll be watching.

Ombudsman is working on a "rent to own" basis

After asking about the whereabouts of the Herald's Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, I received the following from the Herald's Executive Editor:

Henry,

We are building an ombudsman relationship with Edward. His work has been ad hoc up until know to provide an outside view on mostly journalistic issues. My hope is that this will grow into a full ombudsman role for the paper. As it is, we're soliciting response to individual pieces as this builds.

By the way, as you get in touch, or talk to Ed, or whatever you do on topics involving The Herald, you probably want to identify yourself either as an interested reader, or a critic of the paper who's going to use responses in various ways.

Anders

I don't know what it means to "solicit response to individual pieces" but certainly the few columns Mr. Schumacher-Matos has written have elicited some response. But it seems to me that the Herald has a lot of issues it needs to tackle if it wants to be honest with itself. I'm not talking about ancient history, but there has to be some exploartion of how certain attitudes date back in time and have been institutionalized within the paper. There's plenty of material to work with, certainly enough to have a full time Ombudsman.

As for identifying myself as the editor of Herald Watch in communications with the Ombudsman, I have done so in both letters I've sent him to date, one of which was printed in the Herald's letters section. Neither letter was addressed by Schumacher-Matos in the paper or in the form of a private response. One letter was in reference to the seeming double standard in reporting unsavory details about the arrest of a prominent member of the business community while the arrest of a Herald journalist for soliciting a teen-aged prostitute garnered barely a mention. The other letter was regarding the comments left on electronic versions of the Herald's articles, many of which are racist, hateful, or otherwise troubling. There is no moderation in the comments and anyone can leave a comment using someone else's name. The Herald did assist me in this matter when I complained of others using my name to make such remarks, but the overall problem remains.

Ombudsman Kaput?

Have the Heralds already ended their ombudsman experiment? Edward Schumacher-Matos name does not appear on the Herald's contact list, or on its list of contributors. I'm pretty sure I had seen it there before.

I've sent a note to Anders Gyllenhaal to inquire. We'll see what, if anything, he says.

The Heralds' Counter offensive

It seems that the MHMC is trying to arrest plummeting circulation figures by wooing back the Cuban-American population. As I noted here, the recent coverage the Heralds are calling The Cuba Puzzle appears to be part of that counter offensive.

And tonight the big guns came out to be interviewed on A Mano Limpia, a local Spanish prime time TV show that covers Cuba almost exclusively. Present for El Nuevo Herald was Editor Humberto Castelló and for The Miami Herald was the Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal.

A wide variety of topics were covered, including whether or not MHMC would be attempting to open a bureau in Cuba. Gyllenhaal asserted that when "he dies" there would be interest but that under the current circumstances, foreign media bureaus are "controlled". Castelló recounted the fact that 3 foreign journalists were recently expelled from Cuba.

Then Oscar Haza put Gyllenhaal in the uncomfortable position of having to defend columnist Ana Menendez' vitriolic attacks on the exile community in Miami. Gyllenhaal attempted to justify her comments by saying she only used the words "Miami Mafia" for effect to make a deeper point but that readers focused on those words and the greater point was lost.

When asked about the state of relations between the two newsrooms, Castelló affirmed that the relief should be evident in his face. That Gyllenhaal has breathed a new life into the relationship and that he arrived with new ideas and good will. What went unsaid was that those new ideas and good will were not present in the previous Executive Editor, Tom Fiedler.

Also covered on the show was the issue of important stories that are covered by one paper and not by the other (or covered days later). Gyllenhaal said that in the past the two papers were not communicating as well as they should have in many cases and chalked the other cases up to logistical problems.

Overall I got the impression that Gyllenhaal wanted to come out and demonstrate that there's a new sheriff in town and that he knows where the problems are. Hopefully, that will be the case, but I think he's still in denial about the Herald's columnists and how their constant belittling of Cubans is affecting the papers' readership.

McClatchy surprise, selling Star Trib

In a surprising move McClatchy, the parent company of MHMC has sold the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which happens to be the paper that TMH's new executive editor, Anders Gyllenhaal, came from. The sale price of the paper ($530 million) is actually about half of what McClatchy paid (1.2 billion) for it in 1998. That's a lot of red ink, ouch.

"Gyllenhaal said Tuesday he was asked to take the Miami job before he learned that a Star Tribune sale was pending."

Perhaps he didn't know, but McClatchy knew. I guess Gyllenhaal should feel honored that McClatchy wanted to keep him around, even as they planned to scrap the underperforming paper he was at.

The new owner of the Star Tibune is a private investment group, Avista Capital Partners.

Hat tip to: Enrique