If you've read this week's New Times cover story on the rise and fall of South Florida's daily newspapers, you're familiar with the Sun-Sentinel's infamous memo-writer, Lee Abrams. He's the chief innovation officer for the Tribune Co., the Chicago-based media giant that owns the Sun-Sentinel.
Abrams' goal is to get the company to "evolve" and thrive in the digital age. He's known for emailing long-winded "think pieces" to employees, pontificating on how they can improve, using catch-phrases like AFDI -- Actually Fucking Doing It.
New Times columnist Bob Norman has graciously chronicled many of Abrams' memos on his blog, The Daily Pulp. I also recently interviewed Abrams by phone. Here's a collection of some of the best Abrams quotes from both sources. Read them and try not to weep.
1. "You are either WITH the revolution or AGAINST it. You will either be embraced by the company and win or the company will beat you. No middle ground."
Technology. It's supposed to be our friend. But friends don't conspire with a Deerfield Beach company to help police officers write more speeding tickets. In its methodical march toward world domination of the ticket-writing technology market, Advanced Public Safety on Fairway Drive just landed a contract with the police department in Bowie, Maryland.
You're welcome, Bowie drivers! Now, after cops give you a ticket, they don't have to haul their paperwork into the station. The APS device allows them to send it there electronically, Less hassle, less time. Leaving cops with more time to write more tickets.
Oh, don't fret, South Floridians. The nefarious technology is already in place here -- Broward Sheriff's Office has it; ditto Fort Lauderdale P.D., Hollywood P.D., and West Palm P.D., among some 750 law enforcement agencies in the APS empire.
Don't worry, the new gay paper will still cover Charlie.
South Florida Blade editor Dan Renzi stopped by his Wilton Manors office last Sunday evening to check his email, and encountered a strange sight. Michael Kitchens, co-president of Blade parent company Window Media LLC, was standing at the front door, crying.
"He looked at me and said, 'You can't go in. We're done," Renzi says.
It was a dramatic scene, bolstered the next day by news reports that Window Media, the nation's largest gay newspaper group, had suddenly shut down. The Southern Voice in Atlanta and the Washington Blade in D.C were unceremoniously shuttered, prompting concerns across the country that gay and lesbian media was dead.
But Renzi says the hand-wringing in South Florida was overblown. On Monday,
After reading this week's cover story about the massive job losses and financial troubles at South Florida's daily newspapers, you may wonder how New Times is faring. Our tiny newsroom, not surprisingly, has also shrunk in recent years, although not by the same kind of numbers as the dailies.
In the past couple of years, Village Voice Media Holdings
LLC, which owns New Times, has laid off employees at several of the 14 alternative weeklies it owns throughout the country and has sold three papers -- Cleveland Scene, Nashville Scene, and East Bay Express. New Times Broward-Palm Beach has seen its newsroom staff shrink from 17 to 13 and its circulation drop from around 80,000 to 54,500.
I called Scott Tobias,
president and chief operating officer of Village Voice Media, to ask him about the future of New Times. After the jump, read excerpts from the interview.
This week's New Times cover story details the human cost of the massive layoffs that have hit South Florida's three major daily papers in the past couple of years. According to estimates by New Times media critic Bob Norman, roughly 1,000 jobs have been lost at the Palm Beach Post, Sun-Sentinel, and Miami Herald.
One of the most dramatic cuts happened at the Palm Beach Post in August 2008, when about 300 people -- including roughly 130 from the newsroom -- accepted buyout packages to leave the paper. More layoffs followed this September. The Post's newsroom staff is now half the size it was in early 2008. And many people with 20 or 30 years in the news business are living off unemployment checks.
Someone in the Palm Beach Post marketing department has a cruel sense of irony. The paper's latest ad campaign -- now popping up in the paper, online, and on billboards around town -- strikes very close to home for Post staffers.
"Anxious About Your Job?" reads the headline, beneath a photo of a worried-looking guy.
Well, yes. More than 300 Post staffers have lost their jobs in the past year or so,
An article in today's Miami Herald about the method Scott Rothstein used to bilk his pal Ed Morse out of millions sounds like it came straight out of some Nigerian scammer's playbook. 419 fraud, also known as "advance fee" fraud, requires that victims wire money in advance to obtain a large cash payout that never arrives. Usually the original contact arrives in the form of an email from a widowed princess from Benin or a phony barrister in Ivory Coast with an inheritance to disperse.
That's about the only difference from the way Rothstein set up Morse. Rothstein was a real lawyer, apparently, instead of just some guy posing as one. But otherwise, the game was identical. Rothstein invented a $23 million court settlement, forged federal court documents, and promised Morse access to a phony bank account in the Cayman Islands. All Morse had to do to get his hands on the money was -- guess what? Pay an advance fee.
Lee Abrams is an infamous figure around the Sun-Sentinel newsroom. He's chief innovation officer for the Tribune Co., which owns the Sun-Sentinel, WSFL-TV (CW), the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and a slew of other newspapers and television stations across the country.
Abrams ordered the dramatic redesign of the Sun-Sentinel last year, which ushered in the era of the enormous red-and-white S, and just two stories on the front page. But he's mostly known for his "think piece" emails, which are meant to motivate and inspire the troops but are often long, exhaustive, stream-of-consciousness diatribes, littered with trademark phrases such as AFDI -- Actually Fucking Doing It.
The Oasis of the Seas, the largest ship ever built (think Noah's Ark meets the Titanic meets Rhode Island), cleared her largest obstacle this week en route to a new home in Fort Lauderdale.
AP reports that crew on the massive 20-story, $1.5 billion ocean liner lowered the telescopic smoke stacks to clear the Great Belt Fixed Link in Denmark. According to witnesses, the ship cleared the bridge by about two feet.
We've posted video of the gargantuan vessel (which is due to dock at Port Everglades next week) here and here, but I spoke with a Miami-based representative of Royal Caribbean yesterday.
Poor Frank Sarcona, AKA Frank Sarcone, AKA Dave Johnson. Whatever the chap's name, he lacks the creativity to concoct new scams. Sarcona -- let's stick with that -- was convicted last week by a federal jury for a host of fraud charges, after he violated the terms of an injunction that barred him from "deceptive marketing practices." Sarcona's specialty: weight-loss drugs that promised impossible results.
This criminal conviction came ten years after a civil regulator, the Federal Trade Commission, won a judgment against Sarcona for exactly the same kind of scam. A 1999 Sun-Sentinel article (sorry, but there isn't a link) explains how in the mid-1990s, Sarcona promised "SlimAmerica" buyers they could lose 49 pounds in 29 days without diet or exercise.
The physician who backed this improbable claim: Dr. Howard Retzer, who apparently knew nothing of it. FTC attorneys found Retzer in a nursing home -- the elderly man suffered from dementia and hadn't practiced medicine for years.
No, the paper's not closing. But after losing hundreds of employees to layoffs and buyouts and shuttering its presses so the Sun-Sentinel could print the paper, the Palm Beach Post has a lot of extra office equipment laying around.
Desks, chairs, bookcases, and filing cabinets are being hawked from the paper's headquarters in West Palm Beach all this week.
After the jump, check out the email that was sent to Post employees last week,
At this rate, what next? Do-It-Yourself home liposuction kits?
I know this may come as bad news to the middle-class folks with a jones for cosmetic surgery, but the days of bargain Botox may soon be over. This is the kind of article that politicians tend to clip out, then paste into a new piece of legislation. It appears to have been inspired by the death in September of Rohie Kah-Orukatan of Weston. From the New York Times:
On Sept. 25, Mrs. Kah-Orukotan, a 37-year-old nurse, entered the Weston MedSpa in Weston, Fla., for a minimally invasive liposuction procedure to remove fat from her abdomen and thighs. During the treatment, she suffered seizures and never regained consciousness.
I didn't see this in the local dailies, but the St. Petersburg Times is reporting that Muvico's CEO, Michael Whalen, and two of his closest associates have left the chain to form a new one, called Paragon Entertainment.
Muvico's been struggling mightily. Back in March, it announced a "financial restructuring" that included selling four theaters -- two of which were Muvico locations in Boca Raton and Davie. That left the company, which is owned by Joseph Amaturo, with ten theaters. Among them, the Pompano 18 and, in West Palm Beach, the Parisian 20 and IMAX.
On a recent Friday night at Lost Weekend on Clematis Street, Aaron Wormus got his geek on in a big way.
Amid the beer glasses, darts, and pinball machines, Wormus dragged out his laptop and proceeded to give a small group of friends a tour of a new...computer operating system.
"It was pretty low-key," Wormus admits."I think it was kind of intended to be like that."
Two of South Florida's most powerful industries -- sex and hip-hop -- are collaborating. Yesterday, Miami-based hip-hop star Flo Rida released the video for his song "Touch Me" on a risque website based in Boca Raton: AdultFriendFinder.com.
The site is owned by Penthouse media and marketed as a way for those looking to swing and have casual sex. Even the stodgy Wall Street Journaltook an interest in this venture -- strictly from a business standpoint, of course.
You can see the video here. A Juice investigation found no evidence of nudity.
New numbers released today by a journalism industry auditor show that the Sun-Sentinel has won a rare victory in the South Florida media wars: Over the past year, its Sunday circulation surpassed the Miami Herald's.
Preliminary numbers compiled by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show that by the end of September, the Sentinel's Sunday circulation was 239,230, compared to 238,613 for the Herald. Last year at this time, the Herald's Sunday
Calvin, Giordano is making record profits this year.
Don't be deceived by news of layoffs, foreclosures, bank failures, and tax hikes. South Florida's economy isn't suffering too badly. Take Calvin, Giordano & Associates, the Fort Lauderdale consulting firm that's on track to break its own record with $25 million in revenue this year.
Dr. Sanford Siegal, the so-called "cookie doctor" from Kendall and partner-turned-rival Dr. Sasson Moulavi of Boca Raton have taken their diet war into the pages of the New York Times. Siegal gets more ink, but he also gets the biggest share of skepticism. From the article, headlined "Skin Deep" in yesterday's edition:
Critics of cookie diets are not convinced. Weight-loss plans that center around a diet of below 1,000 calories do not, they say, lead to long-lasting weight loss and can result in potassium deficiency, gallstones, heart palpitations, weakened kidney function and dizziness.
In April of last year, Deirdra Funcheon wrote this New Times article about the tug of war between Siegal and Moulavi over the cookie diet franchise.
Now that the U.S. Justice Department has committed -- at least rhetorically -- to an "efficient and rational use" of its enforcement powers against marijuana users and sellers, there's money to be made. Maybe Commerce Online of West Palm Beach will emerge as a kind-of mountain cabbage Mastercard.
The company, whose website is here, this week announced the launch of its GreenCard, a debit card through which people with permission to use marijuana for medical purposes can pay for it electronically.
In a statement, Commerce Online CEO Kyle Gottschalk said:
Can't get laid? Well, maybe some free WiFi will cheer you up. Google is teaming up with the newest airline to serve Fort Lauderdale - Hollywood International Airport so that virgin travelers can have free internet.
Seriously, though, how long till our local low-fare / low-brow carrier, Spirit Air, targets the Virgin market -- and the virgin market -- for some Mile High Club promotion of its own? Oops, again! Spirit's already played a similar angle.
Today, newswires were abuzz with the information that a Washington-based nonprofit group called the Cancer Project, on behalf of two plantiffs in Connecticut, filed a class-action lawsuit against Burger King, McDonald's, and Friendly's. The lawsuit alleges that chicken sold by the three restaurant chains contains a chemical, PhIP, which causes cancer. PhIP can form during the grilling/barbecueing/flame-broiling process.
Florida has seen its history of hilarious marketing strategies. (Remember the Tampa Bay Bandits' million dollar give away...that was actually $50,000 every year for 20 years, starting in 20 years? The team folded after three years. Nobody got a dime.) But offering Brits the chance to have tea with dated ironic icon MC Hammer may be the best yet.
It's part of a new ploy from Pompano Beach-based Cash4Gold. And more than 1,600 UK residents have already entered their names, hoping to win the honor of tea time with Hammer--and a UK-based celebrity to be named later.
Just imagine all the questions you could come up with as you load little squares of sugar into your tasty black tea. The pants. The dance. That cool song with the Addams Family. Probably best if nobody mentions financial planning though.
The best visits to tattoo studios are usually spontaneous, but Hollywood Sen. Eleanor Sobel is not your typical patron. She has scheduled an appointment at 10 a.m. Monday at Stevie Moon Tattoo NE 26th Street in Fort Lauderdale. There she'll meet her foe-turned-friend, Stevie Moon, who earlier this year led the revolt against the bill Sobel sponsored in this past legislative session, which he says would have over-regulated Florida's tattoo industry.
Sitting at home in Coral Springs last fall, trying to explain the intricacies of the federal bank bailout to their 9-year-old and 11-year-old kids, Shari and Jordy Sopourn hit on the perfect, Jon Stewart-style solution: ridicule.
They devised a board game that's reminiscent of Monopoly, except the players are bank CEOs, and their goal is to lose all their money and get a bailout.
Along the path to destruction, they might meet a Ponzi schemer who defrauds investors, or be forced to call a plumber named Joe when a pipe bursts. There are cards for Frantic May and Frivolous Mac, banks named Washed Up Mutual and Bankruptcy of America. In short, Bailout! The Game is a treasure trove of American history.
It's that time a year again. All week, WLRN-FM (91.3) has been filled with the guilt-inducing sounds of yet another NPR fund drive. It's oppressive and embarrassing for everyone involved.
Today on Morning Edition, Bonnie Berman cut to the chase: "By giving now, you'll help keep WLRN's fund drive short," she said.
With that in mind, I have a few suggestions for how WLRN and all the local NPR stations can make these annual money grabs more enjoyable for everyone involved. Forget rewarding donors with wine tote bags and Caribbean cruises, people. Give us something we really want:
Citing an apparent "culture of corruption" taking root in South Florida, Gov. Charlie Crist on Wednesday called for a statewide grand jury to take a sweeping look at honesty-in-government in Florida.
The panel will have the authority to indict public officials and make recommendations for changes in state law, the governor said.
"Today we take a stand to root out public corruption," Crist said, adding his action sprang from "an unsettling string of crime, unconscionable violations of the public trust by public officials, predominantly in South Florida."
The culture of corruption is nothing new. This week's New Times feature story details what happened when one West Palm Beach nonprofit developer was solicited for campaign contributions to grease the wheels for planned affordable housing project. The end result? A grand jury convened in 2006 on the question of whether West Palm Beach was a "pay to play" city. Snippets from the Grand Jury report after the jump.
This week's New Times feature details the battle between forward-thinking urban activists and the City of West Palm Beach over how to develop a blighted section of West Palm Beach, Northwood Village. That battle centered around whether or not Publix could be wooed to the neighborhood's planned anchor site. The city claims Publix sniffed and declined. The activists say it was a done deal before Mayor Frankel and her henchmen got involved.
Well, it seems little Lake Worth has gone and done in a matter of months
Can you find a city where Calvin, Giordano is not working?
The private, Fort Lauderdale-base consulting firm Calvin, Giordano & Associates plays a big role in providing essential government services in Broward County. As the Juice has reported, the firm has a monopoly in the City of West Park -- doing everything from planning and engineering to running the city website -- and recently took over building inspection duties for Broward's second-largest city, Pembroke Pines.
Company President Dennis Giordano boasts that the firm "pioneered" local government privatization. He says it helps small municipalities provide services they couldn't otherwise afford, thanks to the recession and rising pension and health care costs.
"This year our business has grown, because we've got a good model, a good business model," he says.
One of Palm Beach billionaire Bill Koch's main objections to a proposed offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound -- which he has spent millions of dollars fighting -- is that it will require tax breaks to succeed. As the Juice reported earlier today, Koch has claimed that the annual $100 million in tax subsidies will be passed on to customers in the form of higher electric bills.
This is a delightful bit of math for a couple of reasons. First, because the coal industry -- which is Koch's line of work -- has benefited from billions of dollars in federal tax breaks.
Second, Koch's company, the Oxbow Group, gets plenty of other tax breaks. In
Contributors: Eric Barton, Michelle Centrone, Deirdra Funcheon, Keith Hollar, John Linn, Michael J. Mooney, Bob Norman, Lisa Rab, Nicole Rodriguez, Gail Shepherd.
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