Carl Hiaasen, the venerated Miami Herald writer, has penned his last column for the Florida newspaper, ending his long-running association with a stark warning about the disintegrating state of local journalism in America.
Across 35 years of opinion writing Hiaasen has covered everything from corruption among Miami’s power brokers, to scandal in Florida’s Tallahassee state capitol, to the wanton environmental destruction of the Everglades and other natural areas – an issue close to his heart.
In his final column for the Herald, Hiaasen also addressed the impact of the long-running crisis in local journalism, at a time when American newspapers are closing in their droves and journalists are being laid off with depressing regularity.
“Retail corruption is now a breeze, since newspapers and other media can no longer afford enough reporters to cover all the key government meetings,” Hiaasen wrote.
“You wake up one day, and they’re bulldozing 20 acres of pines at the end of your block to put up a [supermarket]. Your kids ask what’s going on, and you can’t tell them because you don’t have a clue.”
Hiaasen, a Florida native who got his start at the Herald as a city desk reporter in 1976, began writing a weekly column for the newspaper in 1985. Alongside his opinion writing Hiaasen has become a celebrated novelist, known for Florida-set crime thrillers with a dark comedic bent, but his Herald column has remained an important part of his output.
The local news industry in the US was already in a sorry state before Covid-19, with some 1,800 newspapers closing between 2004 and 2018, and coronavirus only worsened the crisis. Without local news coverage, important decisions can slip by unnoticed and unchallenged, Hiaasen warned, with devastating consequences.
“That’s what happens when hometown journalism fades – neighborhood stories don’t get reported until it’s too late, after the deal’s gone down. Most local papers are gasping for life, and if they die it will be their readers who lose the most.”
Even before coronavirus, closures and cuts to local newspapers meant that 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 didn’t have one at the end of 2019, according to the University of North Carolina’s journalism school. Since the pandemic scores of journalists have been laid off across the country, while the Pew Research Center reported that newspaper ad revenue dropped by 42% in the second quarter of 2020 compared to the previous year.
At least 60 local newsrooms closed during 2020, including the Orlando Sentinel, New York’s Daily News and the Annapolis-based Capital Gazette, where Hiaasen’s brother, Rob Hiaasen, was among five employees shot dead by a gunman in 2018.
“Rob’s family and mine will be forever grateful to the hundreds of you who reached out to us after that heart-crushing day,” Hiaasen wrote in his final column, which he ended with a tribute to the Miami Herald.
“Finally and most important, I’ve got to thank the Herald and its streaming cast of talented, tenacious editors and reporters. Their superb, solid work always made my job easier,” Hiaasen wrote.
“Now someone else can come along and do it better.”
