What I learned at the Herald...

The elementary title of this post is sarcastic of course. But, like I said before, I felt sort of funny going on a class field trip in – this – my senior year of college.

But, despite my playful mocking, the trip to The Miami Herald was definitely worthwhile. While I had been there before (I shadowed a reporter during sophomore year), this trip offered a more focused look at the very subject we are studying in this class – online journalism.

We were met in the lobby of the building, which felt more like an airport security checkpoint (IDs, metal detectors, card swipes…phew…) by the Herald’s Director of Multimedia Rick Hirsch. Rick escorted us to a fifth floor conference room where we discussed the newspaper business, how it has changed, how it is still changing, and how it will continue to change throughout our lives (and likely that of our children’s).

Here are some of the noteworthy things that I took away from our discussion:

*The print edition of The Miami Herald still reaches about 30 percent of the people in South Florida (but that number is way down from when the paper was home-delivered to 70 percent).

*The Herald’s radio shows reach not only Dade County, but Broward and Palm Beach County too.

*The Herald’s “Continuous News Desk” (responsible for updating the website) runs on a 21-hour news cycle. The first person comes in at 3:30 a.m. and the last person leaves at 1:30 a.m. During that entire time period, someone (Homepage Producer) is editing and updating the site’s front page.

*8 to 9 a.m. on Monday’s is the website’s busiest time.

*The Herald’s website traffic declines 20 to 25 percent after 5 p.m.

*Based on studies of site readership, the Herald will post different kinds of news on different days of the week and at different times of the day.

While there, we also had the opportunity to see the Herald’s two radio studios and the soon-to-be television studio (under construction). It's pretty remarkable to see radio and television studios in the newsroom of a newspaper. Who would have thought that would be the case just 15 years ago?

In addition to learning a great deal about how the Herald is keeping up in an ever evolving and increasingly demanding news environment, I also happened to run into High School Sports Editor Andre Fernandez on my way out. Andre is responsible for assigning games to the Herald’s high school sports freelance writers (that’s me) and so we speak quite often on the phone.