Just received the following via an anonymous source:

From Miami Herald executive editor Tom Fiedler, sent to the Herald staff via e-mail on April 12, 2006:

To the staff,

All of you who have stepped off an elevator into the Miami newsroom in recent days cannot have missed the wall-mounted flat-screen monitor constantly displaying and refreshing the MiamiHerald.com site.

And if you've attended any of the morning or afternoon news meetings, you will have heard an opening discussion about what's on that site, how many hits each article has received, and what's coming to the site later in the day.

These may seem like the incremental markings of evolutionary change, mere head-nods toward on-line as we continue to think of ourselves as newspaper people first, foremost and -- perhaps for some -- always.

But that cannot continue to be. Today we change. Today, as in NOW.

Three years ago, on one of the anniversaries of our 100th year, we focused time, thought and effort into remaking the newspaper as part of the New Century Project. I have no doubt that it produced a more successful newspaper, one that incorporates all of the great journalism on which we've prided ourselves, presented in a more visually exciting and easier-to-use newspaper. Imitators are legion.

But time marches on and constantly improving the newspaper isn't going to guarantee success, either in journalism or in the marketplace.

I have two messages to deliver today.

First, my goal is to remain as relevant, as important and as influential to this community in the future as we have been in the past -- and to do it through world-class journalism. It's a goal we all share.

Second, we will make delivering that journalism on MiamiHerald.com and our other media platforms just as high priority as delivering it in The Miami Herald. Let me repeat that for emphasis: Just as high.

We are beyond being satisfied with incremental change and giving polite head nods toward other media platforms. We are going to execute fundamental restructuring to support that pledge. Every job in the newsroom -- EVERY JOB -- is going to be redefined to include a web responsibility and, if appropriate, radio. For news gatherers, this means posting everything we can as soon as we can. It means using the web site to its fullest potential for text, audio and video. We'll come to appreciate that MiamiHerald.com is not an appendage of the newsroom; it's a fundamental product of the newsroom.

No more will some people be strictly newspaper staff and others will be strictly on-line or multi-media staff. If you produce news, you'll be expected to produce it as effectively for the electronic reader or listener as you would for the newspaper reader. If you edit or design for the newspaper, you'll learn to edit and design for the web site.

We'll be creating and posting several new jobs that will be necessary to deliver on this mission. We don't have the luxury of waiting for new resources to do this, so we may need to find the wherewithal by dropping some of the less-important things we do now. Almost certainly we'll be changing the typical work schedule so we can deliver the news when our audience wants to get it. Of course we'll invest in training to help everyone succeed in new responsibilities.

The details will be worked out over the next few weeks and I invite everyone with ideas to be involved.

Let me stress that we aren't going to milk The Miami Herald to do this. This newspaper is what brought us here and it will remain very successful for many years. There is something special and unique about journalism on the printed page and we won't neglect that going forward. But we didn't fall in love with journalism because of ink and paper. We fell in love with it because it had the power to change lives for the better -- and we can do that on paper, on the web and over the airwaves with equal devotion.

The potential for having even greater impact than we have now is enormous. Although all of us are aware of the challenges we face in keeping newspaper readers, a few facts about MiamiHerald.com:

*In January 2004, our web site captured 100,000 unique local visitors. Last month, just 14 months later, it hosted 250,000 unique local visitors. In fact, between February and March of this year, our on-line traffic grew by 22 percent. Remember, of course, that only on the web site can we reach readers without regard to geographic boundaries, something we do very well and can do even better.

*Across the nation, newspaper web sites increased the share of 18-24 year old readers by 9 percent, and 25-34 year olds by 14 percent.

*We're making money. In the first quarter of this year, our websites exceeded even optimistic revenue estimates by $2.2 million.

When I entered this business 35 years ago, the way things were done in the newsroom wouldn't have been unfamiliar to someone doing my job nearly 100 years before. I scarcely can imagine what the newsroom will look like 35 years from now in terms of how we deliver our journalism.

What's exciting is that we are in the position today of shaping that future. What we do will largely determine how successful The Miami Herald will be in serving generations to come. As I said, that's exciting -- and daunting.

This much is certain: We won't be successful by standing still and lamenting what used to be. Three years ago this September we launched the New Century Project. Now we need to begin work on the next century and I need each of you to come along.

Tom

A quick response to Tom:

Using the internet and radio and every other source of exposure is fine, but if you really want discerning readers and customers, just cover the news ethically and honestly and keep the biases to yourselves. Dont insult your readers with speculation or innuendo and dont throw in that little statement or jab to "stir up some controversy." We see right through it and the last thing you want to do is insult the very same customer you're trying to attract.

I hope this isnt too much too ask.

And remember there's that new-fangled open source media out here on the net: An Army of Davids monitoring your every move.

In my previous post I linked to a Miami Herald article highlighting ENCASA, a group of "prominent" Cuban-American "professors and artists" who have begun a public relations campaign for the lifting of the embargo and travel restrictions to the island.

I'm all for it. With the following conditions:

- That all Cuban politcal prisoners and prisoners of conscience be released immediately and granted unconditional amnesty.
- That all Cubans on the island be allowed to go wherever they please on said island. The existing system of apartheid must be eradicated immediately.
- That all Cubans be granted access to all sources of information, whether broadcast, print, or internet immediately.
- That all Cubans be granted the freedom to express their opinions freely without fear of repercussions.
- That all Cubans be allowed to travel abroad as freely as Americans or any other human being immediately.
- That all Cubans be allowed to live where they please, work where they please and seek a better life for themselves as they please immediately.
- That all Cubans be treated as equals to their foreign counterparts, including "prominent scholars and artists" from abroad.
- That all Cubans be allowed to elect their leaders through verifiable democratic elections as allowed for through the Cuban Constitution of 1940.

It's not too much to ask.

Get to work on the above, ENCASA, and I guarantee you will have the full support of the entire Cuban-American Community. If not, shut the fuck up and let people that live in the REAL WORLD handle the real world issues.

Read this.

Then go here. Find the commies in the list. Set aside plenty of time, there's plenty of them.

There are some writers that routinely surpass the bounds of excellence and inhabit a land that only a few know. Among historians, Paul Johnson, Victor Davis Hansen, Stephen Ambrose and Shelby Foote* come to mind; in "fiction" -- so broad in scope that it defies categorization -- I have a small pantheon whose work I read religiously: J R R Tolkien, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand, Tom Wolfe, Robert Harris, and Dan Simmons. (Stephen King -- a writer who is better than most folks give him credit for -- and I had a nasty divorce after the sixth and seventh volumes of The Dark Tower, but that is a story for another day.)

Dan Simmons is, first and foremost, a great novelist. Broad ideas, superbly written characters that are so well-defined that you cannot but help sympathise (or hate) them as intensely as you may a real person. He is also a very honest writer who does not surrender his writing to an agenda. The work is first. Among his novels, Song of Kali, Lovedeath, the superb Hyperion series (Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion), a masterpiece of science fiction that belongs in the top ten of all time in that genre, and the recent (and equally excellent) Ilium and Olympos (a retelling, sort of, of Homer's Iliad through the eyes of a dead and cloned 21st century historian, observing the events of the story unfold again on Mars with Zeus, Apollo, Hera and the other real gods!) I think he writes like a god and I devour his new books with pleasure.

On Simmons's website he publishes a monthly letter to readers that is always interesting. Being a former teacher he always picks a subject that interests him and then makes it so readable that we are his thralls until he is finshed telling us his stroy. A while back he mused about Melville; he wrote an essay that incorporated Virginia Woolf and Tony Soprano (!); this month he wrote about a visit he received from a time traveler. The time traveler's purpose was to shake him up and awaken him to the dire situation the West finds itself in. Here is a brief excerpt:

I sighed. I was sick of Iraq. Everyone was sick of Iraq on New Years Eve, 2005, both Bush supporters and Bush haters. It was just an ugly mess. “They just had an election,” I said. “The Iraqi people. They dipped their fingers in purple ink and . . .”

“Yes yes,” interrupted the Time Traveler as if recalling something further back in time, and much less important, than Athens versus Syracuse. “The free elections. Purple fingers. Democracy in the Mid-East. The Palestinians are voting as well. You will see in the coming year what will become of all that.”

The Time Traveler drank some Scotch, closed his eyes for a second, and said, “Sun Tzu writes – The side that knows when to fight and when not to will take the victory. There are roadways not to be traveled, armies not to be attacked, walled cities not to be assaulted.”

“All right, goddammit,” I said irritably. “Your point’s made. So we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq in this . . . what did you call it? This Long War with Islam, this Century War. We’re all beginning to realize that here by the end of 2005.”

The Time Traveler shook his head. “You’ve understood nothing I’ve said. Nothing. Athens failed in Syracuse – and doomed their democracy – not because they fought in the wrong place and at the wrong time, but because they weren’t ruthless enough. They had grown soft since their slaughter of every combat-age man and boy on the island of Melos, the enslavement of every woman and girl there. The democratic Athenians, in regards to Syracuse, thought that once engaged they could win without absolute commitment to winning, claim victory without being as ruthless and merciless as their Spartan and Syracusan enemies. The Athenians, once defeat loomed, turned against their own generals and political leaders – and their official soothsayers. If General Nicias or Demosthenes had survived their captivity and returned home, the people who sent them off with parades and strewn flower petals in their path would have ripped them limb from limb. They blamed their own leaders like a sun-maddened dog ripping and chewing at its own belly.”

I thought about this. I had no idea what the hell he was saying or how it related to the future.

This is the must-read for today.

*I just received the first five (yes, five) volumes of Time-Life's 40th anniversary edition of Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative. The addition of Civil War era photos to Foote's brilliant text is fantastic. Expensive, but fantastic.

...Cuban's have that vaunted free universal healthcare everyone raves about.

Otherwise, when an acto de repudio (act of repudiation) is forced upon someone by fidel's Rapid Response Brigades, like the one on Marta Beatriz Roque on Tuesday, they can take their badly beaten bodies to the nearest healthcare center and get all patched up.

Of course, in the case of Roque, since she is an outspoken dissident, she isnt allowed that great free healthcare.