Ombudsman gets pwned by Salguero

You gotta love Armando Salguero. The Herald's Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos took him to task for using strike through in a blog post to imply that Jason Taylor lied told the truth when he said he'd be happy to be a Dolphin again in 2008. But Armando shrugged off the criticism and had this to say in a subsequent blog post:

Philadelphia's Lito Sheppard, Marques Colston in New Orleans, Jeremy Shockey with the Giants, Osi Umenyiora with the Giants. All are crying (look ombudsman, I'm doing it again) unhappy about their contracts or work situations. All have missed at least portions of this offseason's team activities.

Classic.

Ombudsman takes Sports columnist to task - UPDATED

The Herald's Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, has finally penned a column in which he actually takes a side. Unfortunately for him it's about an inconsequential subject and he is wrong. Now don't get me wrong, I like sports and I think the sports page is probably the most viable section of the Herald these days but having the ombudsman pontificate about what a sports columnist wrote on his blog strikes me as being Neroesque at this point in time.

The blog post in question is about Dolphins defensive end Jason Taylor and was written by Armando Salguero. Even in his set-up Schumacher-Matos shows his lack of knowledge of the sports world:

Coming off a successful stint on Dancing with the Stars, the handsome and well-spoken Taylor says he wants to play pro football for only one more year before going into the movies...

Through his agent, he told the Dolphins in January that he wanted to be traded so that he might have a chance in his last declared year of playing football to join a team with a better championship shot.

This is the real issue with Jason Taylor in a nutshell. Taylor is under contract to play for the Dolphins. Though players often ask for trades, they NEVER make their intentions to retire public when they do so. If the Dolphins are to get something of value in return for Taylor, the team he is traded to would want more than a 1-year rent-a-player. By stating that he only wants to play one more year Taylor has virtually guaranteed that he will not, in fact, be traded. He undermined his trade value.

But the problem with Schumacher-Matos' analysis is how he comes down on Salguero for using strike-through to imply that Jason Taylor lied when he said he'd be happy to be a Dolphin during the 2008 season. Strike-through is a technique that is often used by bloggers to indicate what's really going on while paying lip service to the official line from the subject of the post. For example:

Herald to lay off hundreds of workers down-size.

Bloggers of all stripes use this technique. It's a device that works as a wink to the audience. It means "you and I know what's really going on here."

The problem is that Schumacher-Matos wants Salguero to live by the rules of the newspaper even when he's blogging. And that brings us to the fundamental questions that I have been asking for a couple of years: what's the purpose of the Herald's blogs? What are the guidelines that the Herald's bloggers must live by? Schumacher says:

I agree with at least one blog participant who called the ''lies'' technique a cheap shot. Striking it out but leaving the word all but accuses Taylor of lying, and clearly insinuates that Salguero thinks he is.

Yeah. That's the whole point. Schumacher-Matos goes on to talk about Salguero's sources and whether they are solid or not. To me that's besides the point. It's Salguero's opinion that Taylor is lying when he says he'd happily play for the Dolphins this year. Salguero, unlike Schumacher-Matos, has been on the Dolphins beat for many years and has I'm sure had many conversations with Jason Taylor. He knows him. He doesn't need to have a source to form an opinion about Taylor's thought process.

After all of this, I can't get my mind around the fact that the Ombudsman would waste his time on this. I'd rather have him take a look at how the Herald's columnists like Ana Menendez, Carl Hiaasen and dating back to Jack Kofoed have consistently put forward an anti-Cuban exile position with the paper publishing very little to balance those opinions.

UPDATE: In response to a commenter at his blog, Salguero had this to say about the Ombudsman and his opinions:

My sports editor read the ombudsman column to me and after he did, I asked, "Did he spell my name correctly?" That is as much thought as I have given his opinion. I have thick skin and a deep conviction that my coverage on JT has been fair, balanced and accurate. That is the reason I continue to speak with BOTH sides about the issue and they continue to speak with me.

Herald gets into Cuba blogging...again

The Miami Herald has once again decided that it needs to have a blog about Cuban issues. The new entry is called "Cuban Colada" and is manned by journos from both TMH and ENH such as Pablo Bachelet, Alfonso Chardy, John Dorschner, Jordan Levin, Renato Pérez Pizarro, and Frances Robles. Unless I'm mistaken, I thought I saw this blog once before but the archives only go back a few days. Previously of course there was Oscar Corral's Cuban Connection. Corral is conspicuous in his absence from Cuban Colada. I'm sure Anders Gyllenhaal the executive editor made a conscious decision to keep Corral out of this latest venture into the blogosphere.

The Herald's Blog Problem

I've been writing about the Herald's blog initiative for almost two years now. And many of the same problems I described back then still persist. By my count the Herald is associated with 29 different blogs covering a variety of topics and areas of interest.

I thought it might be instructional to put forward my opinion of what makes a good blog. Though I am no expert, I do run this blog and contribute more or less regularly to at least 3 other blogs with varying readerships.

By my way of thinking there's three things that blogs must have: opinion, analysis and community. Let's take them one at a time.

Opinion. A blog is like the opinions page of a newspaper. It's not news but it's about the news. People tend to read blogs to understand the opinions of the author, whether they agree or disagree. A news article that wasn't important enough to make it into the newspaper does not make a good blog post. A reaction to some news story wherever it comes from, can be. Reporters should not be writing for blogs unless the paper is willing to give them the authority to express their opinions on the blogs.

For some reason, sports columnists at the Herald are allowed to cross the boundary from expressing opinions to reporting news. They make it difficult for reporters to go the other way. One example that I'm familiar with is Joseph Goodman's Gator Clause. Goodman is the Herald's sports reporter the covers the University of Florida beat and most of his posts could be items in the paper. He injects very little opinion into his posts though what he does inject is significantly more than Oscar Corral ever did with his now defunct Cuban Connection blog.

Analysis. Closely related to opinion is analysis. Bloggers often take their subject matter and dissect the various aspects of it, often referring to outside sources of data and corresponding analysis. The Herald's Naked Politics which despite its provocative subtitle, The Raw Truth about Power and Ambition in Florida, is nothing more than a series of factual reports that could also easily appear in the paper. A quick scanning of the most recent posts shows pieces about John McCain opening a campaign office in Florida, a Broward county commissioner that went to New Hampshire to campaign for Barack Obama, etc., etc. No deep analysis into the campaigns and the issues, plenty of things that are no doubt true but no truths. That sort of thing would probably require the blogger to take sides. Take a look at the top political blogs like Huffington Post and Michelle Malkin. You never doubt where the authors stand on the issue they blogging about.

Community. Blogs generate their readership the old fashioned way: they earn it. How? They establish relationships with other bloggers that are writing about the same or related subject matter. Talented bloggers are rewarded by having people link to their posts. The more a blog is linked to, the higher it will place in search results. And if a high profile blogger links to your blog, you can expect increased readership in the short term. If that high profile blogger adds you to his/her blogroll (permanent list of links) it can lead to even more traffic in the long term. The thing is that it's all reciprocal. If you want a big blog to link to you, you should first link to it. Presumably you enjoy the big blog's work so you want your readers to go there. If you're doing a good job, the big blogger will eventually take notice and reward you with a one-time link or a spot in the permanent blogroll. The Herald's blogs live almost completely outside of this paradigm. Their readership is mainly supplied by Herald.com which links to all the Herald blogs, not just on its blog directory but also on the pages of related news articles.

If you look at the Herald's blogs, most of them don't link with bloggers outside the Herald's sphere. To use Joseph Goodman's Gator Clause as an example, he does not link to the top blogs that cover college sports like Deadspin and Every Day Should be Saturday. He doesn't even link to blogs about the University of Florida. As a result, I am sure, many bloggers don't link to Gator Clause. The top blogs, on any subject matter, don't just provide content, they point readers to others with content that they'll probably be interested in. No blog is an island.

Take a look at the L.A. Times blog on USC athletics. Although Adam Rose, the Times' blogger, doesn't have a permanent blogroll linking to outside blogs, his posts are loaded with links to other bloggers and outside sources. It's not simply a tool to promote articles in the Times.

So while the Herald has a ready-made blog readership from among readers of its dotcom it's missing out on the opportunity to bring more readers in by fully participating in the blogosphere the way real blogs do.

I say "real" because I think unless a blog meet the preceding minimum criteria it isn't really a blog. Some of the Herald's blogs offer no opinion or analysis. Others do but aren't really part of the blogging community. As a result the Herald is squandering its opportunity and therefore its resources on its portfolio of non-blog blogs.

I think Rick Hirsch the Herald's new media editor needs to take a serious look at the Herald's roster of blogs and set up some basic rules of the road. As I mentioned, don't have reporters blogging unless you are going to allow them to inject their personality and opinion into their blog posts. No reasonable person believes that reporters don't have opinions. Newspaper industry conventions dictate that they have to hide them, which as anathema to blogging. If Hirsch can't live with reporters expressing opinions then only allow columnists to blog or hire people that only blog. It could be a great training ground for columnists. Secondly encourage the Herald's bloggers to act like bloggers by exchanging links with other blogs.

Another thing. Good blogs are sticky. You want to check back and see if the author wrote a new piece or if he responded to your comment. A reader may check back on a blog half a dozen times a day or more. You have to constantly add content. I do a very poor job of that here and my metrics reflect that. But then again I'm not being paid to do this. All of the above advice is of course predicated on the idea that the Herald wants to increase online readership, and therefore exposure and click-through for its advertisers.

Which brings me to another point. One of the blogs the Herald touts most is Greg Cote's. If the number of comments posted to his entries are an indication of his traffic, he has a pretty good readership. Then why isn't there a single ad anywhere on his blog? In fact, most of the Herald's blogs serve ZERO advertising.

If the Herald is really trying to become the model newspaper for McClatchy on the Internet, then they have long, long way to go.

Corral's Cuban Connection in Cyberia

It appears that The Miami Herald has closed the book on Oscar Corral's non-blog blog, Miami's Cuban Connection. Though the blog is still up, it no longer appears on the Herald's blog directory. Interestingly, Corral's last post on the blog (about CNN's coverage of TV Marti expenditures) was made after he was arrested for soliciting a prostitute but before the Herald published it short account of the arrest (perhaps even before he told his employers about it). Odd that a man who had just disgraced himself, his wife, his family and his employer would choose that time post an item to a blog that he only posted on once in the previous two months.

Herald Watch has received a report that Corral will return to the Herald next week though it's unclear in what capacity. A previous report stated that he'd be working on the "copy desk" in the Herald's Broward bureau. If true, it would mean that it wasn't just Corral's blog that got sent to Siberia