Bad boys, bad boys...

Oscar Corral the Miami Herald reporter that authored a controversial article about journalists moonlighting for Radio/TV Marti less than one year ago, has found himself in a bit of hot water. He was arrested for soliciting a prostitute on Friday night but word didn't come out in the media until the Herald itself reported it this morning.

The Marti Moonlighters scandal that shook out of Corral's September 2006 article ultimately led ultimately to the resignation of MHMC's publisher and the ignominious exit of its embattled executive editor.

Interestingly Corral had been keeping a low profile for several months and had been moved off the Cuban exile beat, Herald Watch believes his sources dried up and refused to talk to him based on his reputation as a muck raker.

Then a couple of weeks ago the SunPost's Rebecca Wakefield did a piece about Corral that included an interview. Corral tried to portray himself as someone who had been charged with an impossible task: covering Cuban exiles without inflaming public sentiment. Now he's charged with something altogether different.

The Herald article does not say the gender of the would-be prostitute he attempted to solicit, and it would be unfair to speculate.

Herald Watch wonders though, who knew about this arrest and when they knew it. It seems like this should have hit the electronic media Saturday and the Herald on Sunday morning, but instead we get a story with very few details three mornings after the arrest?

This is, once again, a case of the Herald's coverage of itself lacking transparency. One must ask how much importance and how much space the paper would have given this story if instead of Corral it had been a reporter from El Nuevo Herald, the paper's Spanish language sister whose reporters MHMC gladly threw overboard after Corral's reporting last year (only to have to hire them back when they completed the full investigation). Or God forbid it had been an exile leader? I'm sure the coverage would have been quite different.

Interestingly, after his arrest Corral did find time to post a note on his all but abandoned blog about a report Wolf Blitzer did yesterday on TV Marti and how it's reportedly a waste of taxpayer money. It seems that Corral relieves his stress by stirring up emotions in the exile community, that is when he's not having sex with prostitutes of undetermined gender in the low rent parts of Miami.

H/T: Babalu

Herald Circulation continues to plunge

Back on April 30th, the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), the primary organization that audits newspaper circulations, released its latest figures.

The Herald's weekday circulation decreased by 5.5% and is down to 272,299 and its Sunday circulation decreased by 10.1% to 342,432. That follows decreases of 8.8% and 9.1% respectively reported in October of last year.

To put those numbers into perspective, an outdated page on the Herald's web site says that in July of 2001 ABC reported the Herald's weekday circ as 314,592 and Sunday circ as 430,080. That's a 13% decrease in daily circ and 20% decrease in Sunday circ in less than six years.

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.