Shakeup in Fort Lauderdale

God, I miss browsing through out-of-town newspapers in bookstores. Had a place across the street from our building in FTL called Clark's Out-of-Town News. Felt guilty that I rarely bought much there for all the browsing I did. So I usually purchased a cheap, $1 Dania Jai-Alai program.

 

If I remember correctly, the Sun-Sentinel was famous for having the world's largest Sunday real estate section back in the '80s, and the money was just pouring in. The Orlando Sentinel's profit margin hit 40-45 percent for a couple years around then, but the Sun-Sentinel suddenly became Tribune Company's golden calf because of the red-hot market in South Florida.

 

The Saturday paper was bigger than the Sunday paper because of sections and sections of real estate ads.

 

We all really made each other better then, and one of the main reasons was that each paper's parent company (Knight Ridder, Tribune and Cox) were making plenty of money and could afford the competition.

Fast-forward 15 years and the Herald is owned by a weakened McClatchy, the Sun Sentinel is owned by an abomination named Tronc and Cox is looking to sell the Post to Tronc, Gannett or maybe even GateHouse.

 

Yeah, that was it. Thanks!

 

And now look how the three South Florida papers, plus Orlando, were all but shut out again in the APSE awards.

 

Part of the reason the S-S had nothing was because the Marlins hated Mike Berardino and let the info out too late for him to get anything for print.

 

The Sun-Sentinel starting losing its way around that time, too. There was a new managing editor who decided to make it the paper of record for South Florida's many "diasporas" (the word "diaspora" appeared in the news sections almost every day) and patted herself on the back when Tribune Co. opened a Havana bureau. As if the Sun-Sentinel really had a prayer of competing against the Herald in coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean (a lot of people at the paper cringed when she called Havana "a suburb of Fort Lauderdale"). There also was an ill-advised push into northern Palm Beach County, where the Sun-Sentinel had little hope of competing against the Post.

Meanwhile, she cut back on coverage of sports and the municipalities in Broward and southern Palm Beach County, which had been the paper's strengths. The paper remained profitable, but it wasn't as good and the print circulation plunge began. It's been all downhill ever since.

 

The Miami Herald pushed too hard into Broward County, also.
Nice try, but nobody covers the local county like the local county paper.

 

Every newspaper in the country has been sliding down the same hill. Ft. Lauderdale sounds like it has been crushed by the loss of real estate ads.

Does the Herald still have foreign bureau?

 

My folks moved to Coral Springs when I was in college, so I delivered the Fort Lauderdale News (and weekend Sun-Sentinel) during summer breaks. I had the extreme northwest route, which included Parkland and five mobile home parks. Back then, Holmberg Road was a two-lane road with about two dozen houses on it. Even in 1977, the Sun-Sentinel was a huge paper on Sundays. We'd get main sections and inserts by the bundle, and usually they'd be in 40 papers to the bundle. On Sundays, they'd be in 8s and 12s. My brother and I would have to make two trips because all 288 Sunday papers wouldn't fit in the back of the AMC Hornet.

After graduation, I couldn't find a radio job, so called up my former route supervisor, and he said the Sun-Sentinel was looking for an sports agate clerk. So I got in at the ground floor just before things really got going there, at $5.50 an hour which was the same pay for a down route carrier but way easier on the car.

The office had CRTs, which was a step up from my time at the Contra Costa Times, which was still scanning from IBM Selectrics into computerized copy. However, I learned quickly what a union shop was when I went to paste up to check on some of the agate I had sent, put my hand on the work table and a guy threw a knife between my fingers and told me the next time he'd file a grievance. From then on, I learned to ask nicely if I could touch the copy.

I also remember someone handing me the phone one busy fall Saturday night and suddenly taking dictation (this was before Trash 80s) from an inebriated Craig Barnes in Tallahassee at an FSU football game. He had a strong Southern accent and talked way faster than I could type, and was getting increasingly irritated at my incompetence. So I tried my best to summarize as he went, but I'm certain when he got back and read the story, he wondered which of us was drunkest.

I also remember getting sent out for Buffalo wings one Saturday night and driving about 12 miles on Commercial Blvd. looking for a hole-in-the-wall place and thinking, "I graduated with a bachelor's degree to be a go-fer?" I quit not long after that and eventually got my own career going, but have wondered had I stuck it out, I might have had a much different career path.

 

Working with Barnes -- "The Colonel" -- could be an adventure. But one thing I always appreciated about him was that if he was covering Florida State football on a Saturday night and the game ended at 11 p.m., the game story -- without fail -- would arrive by 11:01. Same with Ira Winderman on the Heat beat.