The end of an era: reporting in Florida comes to a close
Alligator Alcatraz (even the name is racist and cruel–see the image in the Florida Going to Florida section for the inspiration of the name) is back in the national headlines. The documentary I'm making on the prayer vigils that helped shut it down remains as relevant as ever. Cutting 60 hours of footage to 2 minutes for a trailer for a movie expected to by 90 minutes long if its lucky is agonizing work. I'm pretty proud of the end result though and I'm offering you, dear reader, a first look. I'd love your feedback on this.
Reaction videos and posts are all the rage these days. So what is your reaction to this trailer?
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington DC in February of 1968.
My infinite hope is that more of you support this work financially. I'm loving working on the documentary but the thing you see above took about 40 hours to put together, is still a work in progress, and it alone is taking up a massive amount of storage space. To say the documentary is going to come in at $20,000 to make is an understatement.
But it is close. Please consider supporting this work to get it done.
Table of Contents
Finite
Disappointment
The McClatchy Massacre
If you are in Tacoma, Washington; Sacramento, California; or Miami, Florida you might be excused if you missed the devastating news that Chatham Asset Management finally moved to do what it always does in the end, devour its own children, in this case, McClatchy News.
McClatchy News, which started with one asset, the Sacramento Bee, which was founded in 1857 with a pro-slavery editor who quickly left and was replaced by James McClatchy. By the time the McClatchy Company started truly struggling during the 2008 financial meltdown, it owned dozens of newspapers, including the Tacoma Tribune and the Miami Herald. By 2020 McClatchy, through a variety of missteps, intransigence, bad luck and other factors, filed for bankruptcy.
That's when Chatham Asset, the company that's the money behind David Pecker (Trump's tabloid catch and kill guy), swooped in and gobbled McClatchy up. This is reminiscent of how Chatham bought Postmedia, essentially Canada's McClatchy, and began the process of devouring it.
I have yet to find a McClatchy paper story on the firings. Maybe they are out there--send it to me if you see one.
That's the high level stuff. Big deal.
A bigger deal is the Miami Herald, the paper of record for South Florida, no longer has any reporter assigned to the City of Miami. Or the famous (infamous?) City of Miami Beach. Or any reporter focused on politics. They cut thirty of their ninety reporters.
Interesting that in the run up to one of the most important mid-term elections in American history one of the nation's biggest news media conglomerates chose 50 days before said election to gut political reporting–note, Miami was long a Democratic stronghold all the way until 2024, when it swung from +7 for Biden to +11 for Trump. Most indicators are that that Republican advantage in Miami lasted exactly the length of the 2024 election. But now we won't have the paper of record to help us understand any of that.
On the other coast things aren't prettier. The Sacramento Bee no longer has any sports reporters. Zilch. Nada. Not one.
Some of these reporters have thirty plus years of experience. The biggest sports writer at the Bee has been there decades, grew up in Sacramento reading the Bee and was working his dream job. Now, he's being presumably being replaced by a sloppy combination of random reporters with too much to do and AI that's designed to steal reporters' stories, erase their bylines along with their jobs.
I'm dead serious. Florida Politics contributor Jesse Scheckner put it this way:
McClatchy’s jettisoning of dozens of reporters — who netted the Miami Herald 30 placings in the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2026 Sunshine State Awards, including 15 first-place honors — comes after many resisted the company’s use of their work in AI summaries earlier this year.
In April, more than 65 unionized Miami Herald and Bradenton Herald employees penned a letter arguing their contracts prohibited the company from using their byline without consent, according to the New York Times.
The Miami Herald now frequently publishes stories with unusual bylines, saying the report was edited by a staffer and “produced with the assistance of a proprietary tool powered by artificial intelligence and using (the Herald’s) own original reported, written and published content.”
The labor union that represents many of those laid off captures the personal drama better than I can. Please read it.
The NewsGuild-CWA
And for a more personal take you can look at what Jay Weaver had to say about leaving the Miami Herald after 2 Pulitzers and nearly 30 years at the paper.
Chris Young
About those Automatic License Plate Readers
I told you last week that Sacramento doesn't use Flock Cameras–they use something else. The Sacramento Bee helpfully ran a story this week noting that it is Motorola Solutions and Axon that are used by Sacramento Police and shared with, you guessed it, the whole nation, including Florida.
This is important.
While it is legal to obtain an abortion in Sacramento, it is not in Florida. Anti-abortion states like Florida are known to track license plates to see if a felonious abortion has taken place somewhere in the nation.
Our world is interconnected and while too many of us are grateful that we can stream this or that or that our phone knows what we're about to look for before we punch it in, the reality is, there are few active regulations making sure the people we should trust are the only ones who have access to this information.
Eglė Krištopaitytė
Roque Planas
Remember how I said the Miami Herald no longer has a beat reporter for the City of Miami Beach? Well, one solution is that news desert is to pass the buck and put stories by other agencies behind the Herald paywall: Miami Beach will resist DeSantis by moving license plate readers to businesses.
Or you could just read it at CBS News Miami, the company author Bri Buckley works for and gets paid by.
Bri Buckley
Thankfully, CBS News Miami was able to cover this story in a city with a deep, astonishing anti-civil rights, anti-civil liberty history, both in the long time ago sense, and in the this year senese. But that means that our community has fewer voices trained to cover stories like this and that's bound to lead to oversights and even errors.
He was in Hot Pursuit!
High speed chases are fun on TV and a public safety menace in reality. They should be outlawed except in very specific, very rare instances. When law enforcement engages in them they too often end up with old ladies dead on the side of the road, as was the case here in South Florida in February. In what is now (checks calendar) not February, March, April, May, June, July, or August, the Florida Highway Patrol has finally released dashboard footage showing what happens when law enforcement goes in hot pursuit!
Per the linked Miami Herald report above by Brittany Wallman and Sofia Saric:
As the chasing cops weave around commuters and a school bus, dash cam video shows Trooper Major pulling up behind the truck and ramming it in the far-right breakdown lane. The truck careens directly into a sedan whose driver had seen the chase and pulled over. Speed markings on the video show 90 miles an hour when the trooper makes contact. His own patrol car spins around 180 degrees, coming to rest facing oncoming traffic. Inside the crumpled Nissan Altima, 74-year-old Bonnie Bouffard, a Davie resident who was only four exits from home, was still alive, but not for long. Almost all her ribs were broken, her spine was fractured, her head and neck were injured.
Best breakdown I've seen on what happened to the Amazon plane last week.
MIA: We've Got Drama
The YouTube video is the best explanation of what went wrong on the Amazon crash early last week that cost five innocent bystanders their lives, possibly recklessly endangered the life of the co-pilot of the jet, and may have had a $100 million economic impact here, if not more.
Of course, that's not enough drama. The newly elected sheriff–the first sheriff this county has had in generations (sheriffs are elected, we've had an appointed chief of police most if not all of my lifetime) decided she needed to publicly humiliate the county mayor for having the audacity of suggesting she open a news briefing at the airport the mayor controls after a safety briefing the sheriff skipped.
It is hard to say if she was right to do so, because the reality is, Miami-Dade County hasn't had a sheriff in so long it is actually unclear where the sheriff's turf ends and the mayor's begins. After all, the sheriff is in charge of public safety–until that public safety is fire related, in which case the county mayor is in charge. And Miami International Airport's top official is the county mayor.
So when two jack asses let their plane fly through the airport perimeter on the county streets and catch fire, who exactly is in charge?
The Miami Herald Editorial Board does a good job of pointing out that that is important, that that should be discussed behind the scenes and the public flame out by the mayor and the sheriff is embarrassing.
The story makes me sick, though. Two years ago there is no debate because there is no sheriff. In 2018 the people of Florida passed an amendment that forced the three counties that had no sheriff to get one– all three of those counties voted to not have a sheriff in that election.
Sheriffs are a holdover from the managers of the shire for the king. If that sentence doesn't make much sense to you that's fair. We famously haven't had a king in 250 years. Beyond that those sheriffs weren't law enforcement in the sense that we understand them today, they were local thugs for the king who made sure people paid taxes, showed up to fight in the king's wars, and didn't even think about leaving their shire. Fast forward hundreds of years to America and as early as 1640 there are examples of sheriffs in the colonies. Eventually, these folks become elected officials–the same elected officials responsible for ensuring security of many of the very elections they were being voted on in. Anyway...I'm a historian in training and name only, but actual reputable historians Drs. Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman covered what a sheriff is and what a "constitutional sheriff," which Miami-Dade County's sheriff seems to think she is, is and how that differs from what most people expect from a sheriff.
CAFE
Florida
Gonna Florida
No, you don't wish you had our weather right now
Every time someone finds out you live South Florida the response is the same: "I wish we had you're weather."
No you the eff don't. There are three seasons in South Florida, Paradise (about Christmas through February), hell (April through November) and double hell (spring break). Yes, you want our weather in January. No, you sure don't want it in September.
Howard Cohen in Tuesday's Herald captures just a taste of it:
The storms are coming back. Just when you thought the daily deluges were over in South Florida, forecasters are predicting the return of rain by mid-week. Aside from stray showers, most of Tuesday teases with sunny skies and drier air. Storm chances are 30% to 40%, with highs around 90. But come Wednesday, the region will hear that familiar rumble of thunder as a stormy stretch starts again. At least the Canes and Dolphins are playing on the road this week.
The thing is, the storms are my preference over the 100+ heat index that we often get when there are no storms. My spouse loves to run in the morning. Some mornings its 85 degrees with 77 percent humidity–at dawn.
You want our weather in January, not right now.
Jim Crow 2.0
The main state that the Soviet Union used as pro-communist propaganda to African nations ("why would you want to ally with the Americans when they treat Black people in Florida the way they do?") lead the nation this year in horrifying treatment of immigrant detainees. Just outside of Miami. Across the street from where the prayer vigil footage at the top was shot.
Richard Luscombe
Historic
Interlude
From my favorite Florida History go-to book This Day in Florida History (page 151-152):
On September 8, 1565, St. Augustine was founded by Spaniard Pedro Menendez de Aviles. An admiral in th e Spanish navy, Menendez establihed the town to protecte Spain's claim to Florida in the face of French and English competition. The town also served to protect the Spanish fleets that frequently hugged the Atlantic coast on their way from Havana to Spain. Menendez received a monopoly on trade and permission to distribute lands throughout Florida. St. Augustine holds the distinction for being the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European origin in the continental United States.
Further context from the wikipedia entry The History of St. Augustine, Florida:
St. Augustine was intended to be a base for further colonial expansion (1) across what is now the southeastern United States, but such efforts were hampered by apathy and hostility on the part of the Native Americans towards becoming Spanish subjects. The Saturiwa, one of the two principal chiefdoms in the area, remained openly hostile. (2) In 1566, the Saturiwa burned St. Augustine and the settlement was relocated. Traditionally it was thought to have been moved to its present location, though some documentary evidence suggests it was first moved to a location on Anastasia Island. At any rate, it was certainly in its present location by the end of the 16th century. (3)
- David Lee Russell (1 January 2006). Oglethorpe and Colonial Georgia: A History, 1733–1783. McFarland. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-7864-2233-3.
- What Happened?: The nineteenth century. ABC-CLIO. 2011. p. 88. ISBN 978-1-59884-621-8.
- Hann, John H. (1996). A History of the Timucua Indians and Missions. University Press of Florida. pp. 55–57. ISBN 0-8130-1424-7.
Infinite
Hope
Several months ago I posted a video on YouTube to just sort of test some footage out. I didn't really edit it. I just kinda tossed it up there. It's closing in on 2900 views and is by far my most viewed video, making up over a third of all views all time. I'm not sure if that gives me hope that the documentary will be watched or is just embarrassing. I'm going to choose hope.
As I've been working on the documentary, which at the end of the day is about community and faith, hope and love, I am reminded that good things can happen when we come together. Alligator Alcatraz closed. In December, the Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery, which I spent just about every moment not dedicated to closing Alligator Alcatraz trying to open, will finally open.
Not only does this video contain a bunch of my photographs and footage, it gives a massive shout out to my favorite community, People Acting for Community Together, also known as PACT. PACT's listening sessions, where we pick the year's focus, are happening right now. The stories about what keeps Miamians awake at night that we are hearing are depressing and disheartening. But the idea of tackling these issues and winning fill me with hope.
When we stick together we can win–we can, as PACT likes to talk about, do justice, and love mercy and walk humbly with the creator.
Bear
The History Hound Finds
Underrated story of the decade: A high percentage of billionaires are end times fanatics
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
Trump's economy is hurting the job market for everyone...with the possible exception of women
Mike Konczal
Sun Dancers Demeaned in Wyoming
Some of the key figures in the prayer vigils outside of the cruelly named Alligator Alcatraz are sun dancers. They stood shoulder to shoulder with clergy of all faith walks praying to end the cruelty and barbarity inside the gates of the concentration camp sitting on Miccosukee land. The pastor was specifically attacking Arapaho people, but the sun dance is a ceremony sacred to many first nations peoples in North America. Savannah Peters reports for the Associated Press on the conflict between the pastor and the sun dancers.
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