Herald Trib eviscerates self yet again

The Sarasota paper, "flagship" of the Times group - all that means is it has the largest circulation of a group of weenie papers - announced more newsroom cuts in face of growing mortgage payments on its Main St. White Elephant office building, and a certain lack of interest in its former readership in looking at ads for useless real estate.

Not long ago the Herald webmaster quit after being told, by corporate higher-ups, that instead of being helped to technology used daily by the mother ship paper, the Trib would have to dumb-down its website in order to be cheaper to operate. The site is now looking dumber than ever, and the webmaster, we hear, is headed for the Wall St. Journal. Good luck!

What's more, in the latest round of layoffs, the paper cut its senior staff -- the people who have been there long and cost it the most. Junior folk, it's time to grow an institutional memory, like, immediately.

Sarasota Herald-Tribune Vanishes Big Election Mystery

The New York Times-owned Sarasota Herald Tribune scored another dubious honor Thursday: It reported the whitewashing GAO report absolving the iVotronic voting machines of error, and thus legitimizing Vern Buchanan's "win" over Dem. Christine Jennings in 2006 -- yes, it's taken that long to get just this far.

However, the truly eye-popping feat of reportage by Doug Sword was how he managed to completely fail to mention that less than two weeks earlier, another report came out from the Florida Fair Elections Center, entitled "Sarasota's Vanished Votes," which raised serious questions about the machines, the supervisor of elections, and the entire way the election and its review have been handled in Sarasota.

That report has been disappeared from the Herald-Tribune's reportage just as curiously as the 18,000 undercounted votes from the electronic machines in the Buchanan/Jennings election.

Sword and the Herald-Tribune also managed to ignore the fact that Sarasota activists have been fighting for truly impartial look at the vote and the review of the vote. Indeed, the very day its story ran, Kindra Muntz, President of SAFE and a vocal critic of the Sarasota election process, was interviewed on WMNF-Tampa (fast forward a little to locate Muntz) and discussed at length the farcical procedures of the electoral review, which included allowing the very elections personnel being investigated to decide what the investigators would actually see, and used voting machines that had already been swept clean of data in order to be used in a later vote.

The curious absence of any mention of the Florida Fair Elections Center's "Vanished Votes" report is odd by any journalistic criterion. Surely as the issue is gaining national attention in this presidential primary and election year, it would behoove alleged "News" reports dealing with extremely squirrelly ballot results to mention that there are conflicting studies, instead of just mentioning the one that sees no evil?

One might only point out that prior to becoming an elected representative of the people, Vern Buchanan was - and remains - the owner of Sarasota Ford, the largest car dealership in Sarasota (and the one with the biggest flag). As such, he constitutes one of the major revenue streams of the failing Herald Tribune, which has been cutting staff repeatedly in the past several months in an effort to stanch its bleeding bottom line.

The "powers" that be at the Sarasota paper would be better advised to either act with honor and credibility in reporting, or shut the paper down before it can't afford the mortgage on its fancy new Main St. Media Palace. Anyone in the mood can contact the paper here.

More kudos for the SH-T. not.

How not to do it:

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune carries lots of video news clips these days, but it's all just like TV news, because that's what is is: pickups from the associated (Comcast cable) SSN6 news channel. Most of their video clips are anchor-read items, very short, with 10-second pre-roll ads and post-roll ads that are often longer than the news items themselves.

Experienced H-T site users soon learn to close their video pages as soon as the actual stories are over to avoid the overly long post-roll ads, so they probably don't do much good for the businesses that pay for them. Worse, they are repeated endlessly; the same old ads run over and over instead of fresh ones constantly being plugged into the rotation.

It's almost as if someone in an executive capacity at the Herald-Tribune took a course in how to deliver TV-style news as badly as possible, then came home and put everything he or she learned into practice on the paper's website.

- Online Journalism Review, Robin Miller, Editor in Chief for OSTG, owner of Slashdot, NewsForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, SourceForge.net, and the ecommerce site ThinkGeek.

Milking it at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune

On Monday the pages of the New York Times got smaller, and today one of its major regional news organizations laid off more editorial staff. Only a month after offering a cheapskate buyout of employees 50 and older (and chickenshittedly fessing up), the Sarasota Herald-Tribune is once again announcing that it's "trimming" staff.

Although the article says the number reporters laid off is "unspecified," the bloodletting was in fact quite specific, according to sources within the newsroom. The-about-to-be-trimmed staff was hastily summoned to suspenseful, must-attend meetings in each of the paper's newsrooms, and those being laid off were given their walking papers in front of the entire assemblages.

There's an as yet unconfirmed report that in some bureaus, the assemblies were, Last Judgment-like, divided into two groups. One group was then informed it was saved, the other advised of its damnation.

The Sarasota paper may be the flagship of regional Times rags, but this manner of treating its employees bespeaks a thuggish, mandarin culture that demeans the profession.

The paper is also bagging its tedious "Florida West" section (but rescuing its most tedious features: food, wine, health and fitness,) and closing certain of its bureaus to the public. Ironically, the paper that once feared to attach its name to its online site (it called it Newscoast.com for over a year) now claims it will create "interactive web sites" -- that give citizens the right to post vanity pictures -- to placate residents in the areas where many of the cuts were made.

"Because our customers increasingly interact with us by phone or e-mail, the North Port and Englewood offices will be closed to the public," [Sarasota Herald-Tribune Publisher Diane McFarlin] said. "Customers who prefer to visit us in person can do so at our Venice and Port Charlotte locations."

Virtual readership indeed. Perhaps if the paper actually covered events, realities, hard news with something resembling integrity, it would have fewer revenue concerns.

Then again, it likes to remind its employees that it's a cash cow for the New York Times, which is said to milk all its regionals to buttress its sagging butt. With Rupert Murdock now assuming control of Dow Jones, the Times corporate leeches must be yanking those lugs like they're going out of style. Which it seems they are.




Update: McFarland's memo to staff during the last buyout offer, via Romanesko, via Fading to Black.

Homes for Mary Jane in Sarasota, Charlotte, Lee Counties

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports on grow houses:

As housing prices fall along Florida's Gulf Coast, suburbs like Lehigh Acres, North Port and Port Charlotte have become a haven for "grow houses" where high-grade marijuana is cultivated and harvested.

While the Herald-Tribune prefers to attribute much of this booming new "grass roots industry" to lower echelon bedroom communities like Port Charlotte, Sarasota County's own code enforcement officers say they're finding the Mary Jane Subdivisions among some of the high end housing in Venice and Sarasota.

Amazing how often the SH_T has to go outside of its prime circulation area to cover stories that can be found on its own doorstep.

The new Real Estate Boom appears to be a hit in Port St. Lucie as well, according to the DEA.

Hate crime in Sarasota goes unnoticed by Sarasota press for a week

A family that migrated from Bosnia to Sarasota, Florida, returned home to find their house destroyed by fire, vandalized and covered with anti-Muslim graffiti.

This happened on July 6th, but only began to be reported by local media on July 13th.

It took the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, the "newspaper of record" for the city and county of Sarasota, on the Gulf Coast of the Penile State, until July 14th to acknowledge the event's existence.

The paper, struggling with its own problems of dwindling readership, advertising and real estate woes, clearly has better things to do than report hate crimes that destroy the homes of families who have lived in the city for three years with no record of any disturbances.

The paper has not done a follow-up story. One wonders what it would have made of this if the home were owned by one of the local celebs that juice its salivary glands, or, say, just by a typical cute white family, instead of by a family named Sejfovic from Bosnia with three kids.

The SH_T finally squeezed out an update.

"None of the elected officials who actually live in this community have said anything."

What, them worry? when the media itself displays utter indifference...