The 5 Minute Herald became the 5 Minute Herald? by gimleteye

One reader asked, of our previous post, "what do you mean that the 5 Minute Herald became the 5 Minute Herald"?

First of all, the page condenses news into the same bite size fragments that you find on the internet. But why would anyone pay the cost of a newspaper for what it can get on Yahoo for free?

If we want 5 minute to read the news, that's where we go.

At the same time the newspaper gravitated to compete with Yahoo in the 5 Minute Herald, we noticed that its local coverage started to shrivel too.

A fine example is in today's paper, six short paragraphs in "Around South Florida". The story is one we tried to highlight in an earlier post and reported now as "Commisssioner cuts back low-cost housing plan".

We suggested and still suggest! that the real story is why Commissioner Barbara Jordan, after MORE THAN A YEAR of negotiations with the South Florida Builders, retracted the mandatory provision of her inclusionary affordable housing ordinance.

Today's Herald reports the story as if the change from mandatory to volunteer is just something Commissioner Jordan thought was necessary to "save" the ordinance.

Bullshit.

There is a much deeper story about the influence of the builders on the county commission, and why a key necessity of this community--affordable housing--has been continuously screwed up by decision-makers in high places.

But instead of reporting this story, we get the forty second version.

Our point is this: the news that is really important to our communities, people don't get to read about because the entire thrust of the Miami Herald has been to compress the news in order to generate more profits for Wall Street.

Why spend 5 minutes on the Miami Herald? We often feel this way (except for Jim Morin and a few others.)

Instead of substance, we get the Neighbors section (where real stories--in letters to Neighbors--are usually buried), the 5 Minute Herald, and little snapshots of big stories that can't possibly communicate to readers what is important and what leads them to buy the newspaper in the first place, instead of reading the internet.

The Miami Herald has lots of company in hemmoraging readership, but the answer is not to chase readers down the black hole of the internet: give readers stories that matter to us--in DEPTH-- turn the power of journalism on what matters to us here.

Instead of energizing its strengths-- more investigative reports probing the corrupt and dysfunctional metropolis we live in--, it seems the Miami Herald is more often concerned with papering over its faults and what ails our communities.

And that's why we miss Defede so much. Especially, the unvarnished version.