Saturday, April 25, 2009

Goodbyes at the Herald

Some 50 Miami Herald journalists - victims of the latest round of job cuts - said their final goodbyes yesterday.

Bob Norman has the farewell memo sent out to the newsroom by Senior Editor Mindy Marques.

A few names jumped out at me.

One being that of Georgia Tasker.

If some one's keeping a list of South Florida journalism icons, Georgia must be pretty close to the top.

She's been at the Herald for 40 years and has been the garden writer since 1979, writing elegantly about South Florida's gardens, ecology and all things green.

Another departure is that of Luis Rios, the Herald's director of photography.

Rios had only been at the Herald for 6 years, but his impact was felt last Monday when the Herald won yet another Pulitzer Prize for photography.

former Miami Herald director of photography Luis Rios

Knowledgeable insiders say it was Rios who prodded photographer Patrick Farrell to return to Haiti three times after his initial visit to that hurricane-ravaged country in September.

And it was also Rios - along with other photo editors - who fought with squeamish and vacillating higher ups, to get some of Farrell's more horrific pictures in the paper.

The resulting images shot by Farrell in his four trips earned him - and the Herald - a Pulitzer.

Rios's award? The loss of his job.

But fret not Herald readers; the paper still has a dance critic!

3 comments:

  1. You know what, I had no idea Georgia Tasker was still writing for the Herald. What's the rationale for firing her but keeping Fred?

    ReplyDelete
  2. @ SFL

    I stopped trying to figure out the rationale for anything the Herald does a long time ago.

    My guess is that Georgia covered only a narrow range of subjects.

    Fred can do just about anything.

    Georgia will be just fine however. I'm told she's been hired in some capacity at the Fairchild Tropical Gardens.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jordan Levin is an idiot with no ability to even put coherent thoughts together into a fragment of a sentence. Keeping her on staff is a huge mistake.

    ReplyDelete

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