Winning a Pulitzer prize is allegedly awesome. Being a Pulitzer finalist gets you 18 “almost” emails and, if you’re me, drinks after work on Tuesday with Neil Brown, the very talented, very cool man who runs the newsroom here.
He was talking Tuesday about working in the newsroom of the Miami Herald in the early ’80s, a decade in which the paper won eight Pulitzers and was certainly the preeminent paper in Florida, arguably all of the Southeast.
He started rattling off the names of people who worked there in the Crockett and Tubbs era. Amazing. Just a few from memory: Gene Miller, Edna Buchanan, Bill Grueskin, Jeff Leen, Joel Achenbach, David von Drehle, Gene Weingarten, Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, Mike Wilson, Barry Bearak, Deborah Sontag, Leonard Pitts, John Barry, Sydney Freedberg, Meg Laughlin. There were more. I’m forgetting. It was a long list of people who would go on to win or edit Pulitzers or write books or otherwise shape newspapers today.
The Herald’s daily circulation peaked at 442,560 in 1985.
Now, the Sunday circulation of the Miami Herald is 235,225, down 12.9 percent in six months. The daily circulation dropped 15.5 percent in six months to 170,769.
Its Sunday circulation today is lower than the St. Petersburg Times, Orlando Sentinel, Sun-Sentinel and the Tampa Tribune.
I’m curious whether anybody knows why the Herald has fallen so far in terms of circulation. How does that happen in a metropolis as big and bold and important as Miami?
It’s not rare to run into people in West Central Florida who have been around and still regard the Miami Herald as Florida’s biggest and best paper. I don’t correct them.
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