While I spent my Sunday morning trolling the internet LMAO, and the rest of the day on other self-absorbed, non-productive activities (and, yeah, it was nice to check out for a day), the more serious bloggers were busy churning out the serious stuff people want to read.

At least, the relatively few people who bother to care about things like competence, integrity, accountability and transparency.  You know, those oh-so boring qualities that take a back seat to more exciting (read: profitable) things like greed, corporate cronyism, back room politics and the MTV Movie Awards.

In How to kill a newspaper, Random Pixels delivered another hard-hitting and well deserved smack down of what passes for our local newspaper, the Miami Herald, and its clueless Executive Editor of three and a half years, Aminda “Mindy” Marqués Gonzalez.  Right out of the box, he proved that Gonzalez is either a total ditz or an out-and-out liar by claiming in an interview that Herald readership is 155,000, when the daily press run RP published is less than 95,000.

The article gets better from there as he reiterates the Herald’s refusal to cover crimes, its lack of journalistic integrity and its attempts to control the narrative by publishing fluff pieces disguised as news.  This is nothing new to anyone who’s actually been paying attention to the rapid decline of the Miami Herald, which is the reason local bloggers such as Random Pixels and others are so popular.  Those of us who care about current events and actual news have learned not to rely on the Miami Herald for anything but Sunday sales fliers and coupons.  (It also makes a great birdcage liner.)

The best part of RP’s column is his interview with a “Herald insider,” which begins with:

Obviously, the most significant is the technological transformation of the publishing world. The Herald was entrapped by the same forces that diminished most other newspapers — demographic change, the availability of instant digital information, a significantly dumbed-down, self-absorded citizenry.

But that doesn’t explain the Herald’s dramatic fall from grace. Every other paper in the state and nation confronted the same issues; our plunge has been far steeper than most.

Read the full Random Pixels article to find out for yourself the real story that the Miami Herald publishers don’t want you to know.

Unless, of course, you don’t care about actual news and you’d rather nosh on fluff pieces about celebutants with your morning coffee.

If that’s the case, here’s a screen shot of Zac Efron’s pecs:

Bon appétit.

Stephanie Kienzle
“Spreading the Wealth”