Miami Herald

• 1. Introduction

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  The Miami Herald published its first edition on the 15th of September 1903, not as a bold venture by a media titan, but as a reorganized remnant of an Orlando paper dragged south by a lawyer named Frank B. Stoneman. Stoneman was the father of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who would later become one of Florida's most celebrated environmental voices. The paper he moved to Miami nearly collapsed four years later, saved only by a loan from railroad magnate Henry Flagler and the intervention of a young Indiana lawyer named Frank B. Shutts. That loan, that rescue, that renaming on the 1st of December 1910 launched one of America's most decorated regional newspapers. Over the next century, the Herald would take on organized crime, expose a fraudulent mayoral election, cover the seizure of Elian Gonzalez, and break open the Jeffrey Epstein story. It would win 24 Pulitzer Prizes, fight two landmark press freedom cases all the way to the Supreme Court, and sell its bayfront headquarters to a Malaysian resort developer for $236 million. The questions worth following are how a paper born in financial crisis became a force for accountability, and what forces have tested and reshaped it ever since.

• 2. Survival and Growth

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  Henry Flagler's loan did more than keep a failing paper alive. It handed Frank B. Shutts, a lawyer who had come to Miami only to oversee a bank bankruptcy, an unlikely second career as a newspaper publisher. Shutts renamed the paper the Miami Herald on the 1st of December 1910, and the publication grew alongside the city itself. During the Florida land boom of the 1920s, the Herald briefly became the largest newspaper in the world by one striking measure: lines of advertising. The boom collapsed, and with it came the Great Depression, which pushed the Herald close to receivership in the 1930s. The paper recovered, and on the 25th of October 1939, John S. Knight bought it from Shutts. Knight brought his brother James L. Knight in as business manager, and the Herald then employed 383 people. Lee Hills arrived as city editor in September 1942 and eventually rose to become publisher, then chairman of Knight-Ridder Inc., a position he held until 1981. By 1950, when the paper won its first Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Miami's organized crime, it was circulating 176,000 copies daily and 204,000 on Sundays. Construction of a new headquarters on Biscayne Bay began on the 19th of August 1960, and the paper moved into One Herald Plaza in March 1963 without missing a single edition.

• 3. Fighting for Press Freedom

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  The Herald's first Supreme Court battle began with two articles published on November 2 and the 7th of November 1944, both critical of the Dade County Circuit Court. The court held the Herald and one of its editors, John D. Pennekamp, in contempt. The Supreme Court sided with the newspaper in Pennekamp v. Florida, ruling that the danger to fair judicial administration lacked the clearness and immediacy needed to shut the door on permissible public comment. Pennekamp's name now belongs to John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. Three decades later, the Herald fought another case that reached the Supreme Court. Pat Tornillo Jr., president of the United Teachers of Dade, demanded the Herald publish his rebuttal to an editorial criticizing him, citing Florida's right-to-reply law. Represented by longtime counsel Dan Paul, the Herald challenged that law. The Supreme Court unanimously struck down the Florida statute in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo in 1974, ruling that government compulsion on a newspaper to publish what reason tells it should not be published is unconstitutional. The ruling distinguished print media from broadcast media, limiting the reach of a 1969 decision that had upheld a fairness doctrine for radio and television. The two cases together gave the Herald an unusual place in constitutional history, shaping press freedom law from both directions.

• 4. Pulitzer Prizes and Notable Staff

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  Gene Miller won the Herald's Pulitzer twice before most papers win it once. In 1967 he was recognized for investigative reporting that helped free two people wrongfully convicted of murder. Nine years later, in 1976, he won again for persistent reporting over years that led to the exoneration and release of two men who had been tried twice for murder and sentenced to death in Florida. Edna Buchanan won in 1986 for versatile and consistently excellent police beat reporting. Dave Barry took the Commentary prize in 1988 for his consistently effective use of humor as a device for presenting fresh insights into serious concerns. Michel du Cille won twice: in 1986 for photographs of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano eruption in Colombia, and in 1988 for images documenting the decay and rehabilitation of a housing project overrun by crack cocaine. In 1993, the paper won Meritorious Public Service for showing how lax zoning, inspection, and building codes had deepened Hurricane Andrew's devastation. Leonard Pitts Jr. won Commentary in 2004. The staff won Breaking News Reporting in 2001 for coverage of the Elian Gonzalez seizure, and in 1999 for detailed reporting that exposed pervasive voter fraud in a Miami mayoral election that was subsequently overturned. The 2017 Explanatory Reporting prize went to the Herald as part of a collaboration of more than 300 reporters on six continents for the Panama Papers investigation. Patrick Farrell's photographs of despair after Hurricane Ike devastated Haiti earned Breaking News Photography in 2009. The most recent prize, in 2023, went to the editorial board for editorials on the failure of Florida public officials to deliver on taxpayer-funded amenities and services promised to residents over decades.

• 5. Controversies and Ethics Tests

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  On the 27th of July 2005, former Miami city commissioner Arthur Teele walked into the Herald's main lobby, phoned columnist Jim DeFede, and told him he had a package waiting. He asked a security officer to tell his wife Stephanie that he loved her, then shot himself. The day before, DeFede had recorded a telephone call with Teele without Teele's knowledge, a violation of Florida law. The paper used quotes from that recording in its coverage, then fired DeFede the following day for violating its code of ethics. Nearly 528 journalists, including about 200 current and former Herald staffers, called on the paper to reinstate him. Management refused. The state attorney later declined to file charges, finding the potential violation was without a living victim or a complainant. A year later, on the 8th of September 2006, Herald president Jesus Diaz Jr. fired three journalists for allegedly accepting payment from the United States government to work for anti-Cuba television and radio channels. Those three were Pablo Alfonso, Wilfredo Cancio Isla, and Olga Connor. Within a month, facing pressure from Miami's Cuban community, Diaz resigned after reinstating the fired journalists. He acknowledged that policies prohibiting such payments had been ambiguously communicated, inconsistently applied, and widely misunderstood over many years. At least seven other journalists not employed by the Herald had also received payments ranging from a total of between $15,000 and $175,000 since 2001 for programs on Radio Marti or TV Marti, both financed by the United States government.

• 6. The Epstein Investigation

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  In November 2018, the Herald broke a story that had been buried for more than a decade. In 2007, despite substantial evidence corroborating the stories of female teenagers who described sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, had signed off on a secret deal for the multimillionaire that ensured he would never spend a day in prison. The Herald's reporting revealed the full extent of what had been hidden and brought public attention to accusations that prosecutors had quietly set aside. In July 2019, Epstein was charged with sex trafficking dozens of minors between 2002 and 2005. Coverage at the time noted the Herald's role in bringing the case back into public view. The investigation stood as one of the most consequential pieces of accountability journalism the paper had produced in decades.

• 7. Spanish-Language Ties and Community Reach

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  The Herald launched El Herald, a Spanish-language supplemental insert, in 1976. By 1987 it had been renamed El Nuevo Herald, and by 1998 it had become a fully independent publication. The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald quickly took diverging editorial directions, sometimes producing tense relations and conflicting information about Hispanic communities in the United States. In 1997, the Herald assigned Steve Rothaus, who had been with the paper since 1985, as the first national reporter charged specifically with covering LGBT news. He retired in 2019 as part of a buyout offer made to 450 employees, having spent more than 33 years at the paper. The first African American man to work as a reporter at the Herald was Thirlee Smith Jr., who joined in 1967. Bea Hines became the first African American woman reporter at the paper on the 16th of June 1970. She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for columns covering police brutality and profiling. The Herald International Edition, which began printing through partner newspapers across the Caribbean and Latin America in 1946, extended to Mexico in 2002. In 2023, Alex Mena was named the paper's executive director after beginning his career at the Herald at the age of 19, becoming the publication's first immigrant executive editor.

• 8. Shrinking Footprint

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  In May 2011, the Herald sold the 14-acre Biscayne Bayfront site around its headquarters for $236 million to Genting Malaysia Berhad, a Malaysian resort developer. The paper moved to a two-story, 160,000-square-foot building in suburban Doral in 2013. That building had previously served as the U.S. Southern Command center. Demolition of One Herald Plaza began on the 28th of April 2014. By September 2021, the Herald had sold the Doral office as well, receiving $27.3 million. The paper had been operating remotely since before the closure. Average daily printed circulation, which had stood at 440,225 as recently as 1998, fell to 12,623 by August 2024. Paid digital circulation reached 44,011 before falling to 30,840 in 2023. On the 17th of December 2019, the Herald announced it would move to a six-day-a-week print format. On the 26th of April 2020, it stopped printing its own editions altogether, shifting that work to the South Florida Sun Sentinel's facilities in Deerfield Beach. In 2023, the Herald announced a new headquarters in the Waterford Business District after spending roughly three years without a physical office. That same year, six workers were laid off in what the paper described as the worst round of job cuts to its news staff since 2019.