The Herald and the Marlins Ballpark, a response‏ from the Miami Herald's Andres Viglucci

What follows is an email I received tonight - which I'm posting unedited - from Miami Herald staff writer Andres Viglucci....which I'm assuming he sent in response to posts on my blog like this and this.

Viglucci also sent the mail to two other Miami bloggers.

Full disclosure: I've known Andres for almost 30 years, dating back to when he was a young Associated Press staffer in the Miami bureau and I was a freelance photographer there.

Thanks for the email, Andres. I wish more of your colleagues would take the time to write when they disagree with me. By the way, did you also send this to New Times...or should I do that? Love ya, man!

Guys, c'mon.

You want to take on The Miami Herald for its Marlins ballpark coverage, we're fair game. But do it fairly then. Which of course you don't.

I'm getting really tired of your grievously reductive assessment of the newspaper's handling of the stadium issue, which seems to focus almost exclusively on the edit board and a sports columnist or two. Fine as far as that goes. But surely you know better. There's a lot more to this than you all let on, but then that would spoil your tidy black-and-white storyline.

Andres Viglucci

The sometimes implied, sometimes explicit claim that the reporting staff was in the bag or disengaged or whatnot is absolute, one-sided horseshit. And I've just gone through dozens of clips in our archive (yes. it's publicly available) going back several years because I am royally pissed off on behalf of my hardworking colleagues in the newsroom.

The reason everyone knows the Marlins deal was not a favorable one for the public, down to the decimal point, is through extensive in-depth reporting and analysis done before the contract was approved, and afterwards, too, by Chuck Rabin, Jack Dolan, Adam Beasley, Matt Haggman and others who laid bare the financials, the questionable assumptions and claims and their consequences in excruciating detail.

Not to mention numerous columns by Fred Grimm (who took the Herald edit board to task, in print, in early 2009: "Magical thinking was not just confined to county commissioners or Marlins fans. The Miami Herald's editorial page seemed to ignore the hard work of its own reporters to embrace the dream.'') and sports columnist and consistent stadium skeptic Linda Robertson (OK, she's my wife), and assists by others (including, not patting myself on the back since my contribution was minor, me, who wrote a long time ago that the stadium would do absolutely nothing for economic development in that neighborhood).

Be glad to provide you chapter and verse if you're all too far up your own asses to look it up.

So to write that our reporters somehow dropped the ball when the truth is the exact opposite is unjustifiable, not to say unfair to the beat people who did loads of original reporting -- matched by one else in this town, by the way -- by going through hundreds of pages of contractual crap, financial statements and so on to dig up facts, talking to experts, confronting bureaucrats and politicos, etc etc., i.e., doing their damn jobs.

So, do yours, too, dear bloggers, if you're going to claim some blogging mantle of all-knowing superiority.

And please note that I write this as someone who considers at least one of you a friend, reads you all regularly and to a great degree respects what you do. Except when you fuck up. Which you've done here.

Cheers to all,

Andres Viglucci
The Miami Herald