WOULD YOU CREATE ANOTHER NEWSPAPER TO COMPETE WITH YOUR OWN? IN MIAMI, THE HERALD DID

BY MIKE CLARY

Like most major American cities, Miami for years has had just one daily newspaper. But in recent months a feisty hometown challenger to The Miami Herald has emerged, speaking with a new voice, with plenty of attitude, and in Spanish. And that voice is coming from a very surprising quarter -- the sixth floor of The Miami Herald 's own headquarters alongside Biscayne Bay. The paper? El Nuevo Herald. Spawned as an insert to The Miami Herald in 1976, it is now out on its own as a sturdy, stand-alone daily that's giving the market's Latino readers vibrant, often raffish coverage of world and local events -- in stiff competition with the paper that gave it birth.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Carlos M. Castañeda, 68, El Nuevo Herald's editor, is bent over his desk roughing out layouts for the next day's page one. The choices are wide: from President Clinton's visit to India to a local study of an alarming increase locally in venereal disease. And, of course, there is Elián. Almost every day since last November there has been something in the paper about the six-year-old Cuban boy at the center of the international soap opera with the cold war soundtrack.

But on this newsy day, Castañeda quickly sees that he has something that will kick Elián Gonzalez inside the paper. From his stack of art he chooses a sketch of the exiled Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and decides it will go above the fold. "I don't think they have this story," says Castañeda, referring to The Miami Herald, whose newsroom is just one floor below. "I don't see any mention of it in their budget."

Indeed, as readers of both The Miami Herald and the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald can discover the next morning, Cabrera Infante's decision to return an honorary degree to Florida International University -- in protest over the state university's hosting a delegation of academics from Cuba -- did not appear in The Miami Herald. English-only readers would have to wait a day to learn about the flap, and even then they would get only an item, tucked inside the local section.

Chalk up one more coup for the guerrilleros of El Nuevo Herald. And credit Miami Herald publisher Alberto Ibargüen for making Miami once again a two-newspaper town.

When Ibargüen was named publisher of The Miami Herald in August 1998, he was not ordered to make peace with the city's fervently anti-Castro exile community. Nor was he handed a target figure for reversing the newspaper's precipitous circulation decline, or given any specific instructions on how to restore the paper's fading journalistic reputation.

"I was asked one question," Ibargüen says, recalling his discussions with chairman P. Anthony Ridder and other Knight Ridder Inc. executives. "Can you increase the profit margin from 18 percent to 22 percent in three years?' And I said yes." Ibargüen made clear from the start that he was far different from his predecessor, David Lawrence, Jr. First of all, Ibargüen is a lawyer and a businessman who does not think his role includes coaxing south Florida's fractious, multi-ethnic community into one harmonious chorus. "I am not a political person, and I don't want to be a player in this town," says the dapper fifty-six-year-old.

Secondly, Ibargüen is of Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage, at ease in Spanish and English, in what is the most thoroughly bilingual of America's big cities. Although he was raised in the Northeast and schooled in the English-only executive offices of Times Mirror's Newsday, New York Newsday and the Hartford Courant, he understands the Latino passions that percolate through Miami like so much dark, rich café.

So soon after arriving here in 1995 as publisher of El Nuevo Herald, Ibargüen realized that in order for the paper's circulation to grow, it had to shuck its identity as merely a supplement to and translation of The Miami Herald, and be made available to Spanish readers separately. Lawrence resisted, but Ibargüen insisted. It took two years, but finally, in May 1998, readers were offered the option of home delivery or buying single copies of El Nuevo Herald. To transform it into a real newspaper, he lured Castañeda out of semi-retirement in Puerto Rico and told him: "Give me a newspaper that cannot be confused with The Miami Herald." And that's exactly what Castañeda has done. El Nuevo Herald is a hybrid, a flashy mix of Latin élan, Cuban exile political fervor, and People magazine. It's a broadsheet with a tabloid mentality, and Castañeda says he has only one aim: "Put out a good newspaper that sells."

The selling is important. Almost half of El Nuevo Herald's circulation -- 94,000 on Sunday, 86,000 daily, and growing -- comes from street sales. Bold graphics, big pictures, lots of color and eye-catching headlines have made the paper one that could easily compete in the racks at supermarket check-out counters. And Castañeda does not shy away from splashing opinion all over page one. The seventy-two-point headline over a six-column photo of a Cuban rafter being subdued on the beach by U.S. Border Patrol agents last spring shouted: "¡bochorno!" (Shame!).

In the fourteen months since Castañeda took the helm, he has happily embraced what he calls the "People magazine concept." The formula is working. Circulation gains of 6 percent on Sunday and 9 percent daily make El Nuevo Herald one of the fastest-growing newspapers in the U.S., and has carried the onetime give-away into a virtual tie with

La Opinion of Los Angeles as the nation's largest Spanish-language daily. El Nuevo Herald's advertising revenues also climbed 10 percent in 1999, to more than $21 million.

In absolute numbers, Miami is only the third

largest Spanish-speaking market in the U.S. behind Los Angeles and New York, but the culture runs deeper here. In Miami-Dade County, perhaps as many as half of the 2 million residents speak Spanish, and that percentage is expected to grow into the 60 percent range by the year 2020. And in comparison to Latinos in Los Angeles and New York, the Miami Latino market is more educated, more middle-class.

"I want stories that affect the pockets and the hearts of people," says Castañeda. "One of the problems with most newspapers is that they're too boring. They impose ideas of what news is instead of listening to what people want. Here we cover the news and try to be a little light, too."

Being a little light can often lead to being a little silly. With an editorial staff of eighty-four, including just eleven general assignment reporters, competing against The Miami Herald's editorial staff of 425 means that the scoops don't come often. Celebrities like Gloria Estefan, Jose Canseco, and Ricky Martin have all been pictured more than once above the fold in El Nuevo Herald. "Yes, Ricky Martin," says Castañeda, only a little defensive. "If people want Ricky Martin, why not, especially if we don't have anything better?"

Jim Mullin, editor of Miami's alternative weekly New Times, likes Castañeda's competitive spirit. But some days, says Mullin, "I pick up El Nuevo Herald and I can't believe I am looking at the front page of a daily newspaper."

Ibargüen says the same thing. "I love the surprise of the paper," says the publisher. "You can't predict what's going to be on page one. That's great. But sometimes, I do pick it up and think, 'Where did we leave our brains?'"

He asked that question vehemently one October morning last year when El Nuevo Herald carried only a brief mention of The Miami Herald's investigation of a contractor scandal at Miami International Airport, a series that would later be submitted as a candidate for a Pulitzer Prize. Castañeda denies ignoring the story because it was the work of his downstairs rival; Miami was rocked by a nasty tropical storm that weekend, he says, and the aftermath was of far more interest to his readers.

In a career that began in pre-Castro Cuba and included a long stint as editor of the Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Día, Castañeda has earned both money and respect as an editor and a consultant to newspapers. He expanded El Nuevo Herald's coverage of Latin American sending reporters to hot spots such as Venezuela and Colombia. (Reporters from El Nuevo Herald and The Miami Herald are almost never granted visas to enter Cuba.) He revamped the newspaper's sections, with more graphics and color.

"Many people thought it was impossible to do anything with this paper," says Castañeda. "Well, it was never a paper. It was a supplement. I wanted to create some excitement."

His confidence is contagious. While giving the newspaper a bold new look, Castañeda has performed a near-miracle in the newsroom by cutting staff, boosting salaries, and raising morale -- all at the same time. "Carlos is the kind of boss everyone should have," says staffer Peter Katel, fifty-one, a former Newsweek correspondent in Miami. "He is demanding, but his demands are strictly professional. We are competing with the behemoth downstairs. My idea when I come to work is to do something original. That's the challenge -- to do big stories that everyone in town is going to talk about."

And it happens; David does kick Goliath's butt on occasion. In the last twelve months, El Nuevo Herald reporters beat their Miami Herald counterparts with reports on a Hialeah cop scandal, and design flaws in a new $18 million air traffic control tower at Miami International Airport. Katel scored with a story about an e-mail from the president's Cuban affairs adviser warning of growing U.S.-Cuba tensions that was written the day before Cuban MIGs shot down two exile planes in February 1996. The only occurrence that evokes more newsroom "Bravos!" than seeing a translated El Nuevo Herald story in The Miami Herald is evidence that Fidel Castro himself is reading the paper. And that has happened, too.

El Nuevo Herald's readers reflect the Latino population of greater Miami -- more than half are Cuban-American. That means Cuba and Fidel Castro are big stories virtually every day. And that can lead to excess. As New Times's Mullin points out, when it comes to Cuba coverage, "El Nuevo can be sensational, hyperbolic, pandering to the worst instincts." In The Miami Herald newsroom, the Spanish-language neighbors on the floor above are admired for their sources on the island and within the exile community. The Herald's bilingual reporters read El Nuevo Herald closely, but with a very critical eye, pointing to deviations from standard American journalism. "Carlos has turned that paper around," says one, who asked not to be named. "But is it edited too loosely? Sometimes I wonder."

In Miami, where exile politics tends to seep into everything, Ibargüen and Castañeda do not deny that both the English and Spanish-language newspapers are staunchly anti-Castro. That sentiment slips into the news columns. In its coverage of a press conference held by a former Cuban intelligence agent, the newspaper did not report that in his remarks the man favored closer ties between the U.S. and the Castro government, an idea that is anathema to many exiles (see Darts & Laurels, cjr, January/February). Castañeda says he was not aware of the omission until days later, and denies it was done as a function of policy. But El Nuevo Herald has never run editorials, and Castañeda has chosen not to break with that tradition. "Who is speaking in an editorial?' asks Castañeda. "Some committee? I prefer to have columnists speak, in signed pieces. That's what readers prefer."

Like Ibargüen, Castañeda keeps a low community profile. He doesn't give interviews to the rabidly anti-Castro Spanish-language radio stations, or write opinion pieces himself. Still, he says, he gets calls often from exile leaders who want the paper to take a harder line against Cuba's communist regime. "I am so sure of my product that I cannot be pressured," says the editor. "I am here to make a good paper. That's all."

CARLOS CASTAÑEDA, WHO LED "EL NUEVO HERALD" DIES AT 70

BY TERE FIGUERAS

Carlos Castañeda, the publisher emeritus of El Nuevo Herald whose passionate belief in a free press helped guide several newspapers across Latin America, died Thursday morning in Lisbon, Portugal. He was 70.

Castañeda, who suffered from an aggressive form of leukemia, was vacationing with his wife and one of his daughters when he became ill, his friends said.

A veteran journalist whose career spanned more than five decades, Castañeda bore witness to the vagaries of politics and people -- and helped shape their coverage in more than two dozen papers throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Perhaps his crowning achievement occurred in May when El Nuevo Herald was presented the 2001 Ortega y Gasset Journalism Award, given to the best Spanish-language daily newspaper in the world.

Castañeda's passion for journalism began early. While growing up in Havana, he fell in love with the voices of radio newscasters and sports commentators, and had his own show as a teenager.

In 1954, he joined the weekly magazine Bohemia, which gave exposure to the best Cuban journalists and writers of that era. Years later, he was one of the first journalists to interview a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro.

Castañeda was there when Castro made his triumphant arrival in Havana in January 1959. ''There is a picture of him taking notes with Castro,'' said Salvador Lew, director of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which operates Radio and TV Martí.

But the astute Castañeda sensed ominous rumblings of what was to come.

''He was never with Castro, just the opposite. He was a reporter, very vigilant and very smart,'' said Lew. ``I remember talking with him a few years before about the sad future that was coming for Cuba.''

In 1960, Castañeda left Cuba for New York City with his wife, Lillian, and their family and $50 in his pocket. He worked for Bohemia Libre -- the exile version of the landmark magazine -- before switching to the Spanish-language version of Life magazine, working his way up to top editing post.

In 1970, he helped launch El Nuevo Día, a leading Puerto Rican daily.

During his 28 years as editor and publisher, Castañeda saw circulation grow more than thirteen-fold before ''retiring'' in 1998.

''Don Carlos lived journalism as a priesthood,'' said Puerto Rican entrepreneur Antonio Luis Ferré, who hired Castañeda. ``It was his life.''

Retiring was a term the robust Castañeda used loosely: In November 1998, he was named publisher and editor of El Nuevo Herald in Miami, where he visited often to see his children.

Alberto Ibargüen, publisher of The Miami Herald and chairman of The Miami Herald Publishing Co., recalled running into Castañeda one day at Perricone's Marketplace & Cafe -- and decided he was a perfect match for revamping El Nuevo into a publication with a distinct voice from its sister paper, The Herald.

''He transformed the newspaper,'' said Ibargüen. ``The idea was that El Nuevo should become a Latin American newspaper that happens to be edited in this North American country.''

LEADERSHIP HONORED

In an e-mail to the staff Thursday, Ibargüen paid further homage to Castañeda:

``El Nuevo Herald needed a journalist with a pan-American vision, someone who understood and loved both Cuba and Miami, someone with the courage of his convictions as he transformed the content, tone and pace of the newspaper. Carlos was the man, and . . . the Ortega y Gasset prize was fitting tribute for his extraordinary leadership.''

Last December, he turned the reins over to Humberto Castelló, who worked with Castañeda in Puerto Rico.

'Carlos' life was ruled by faith, journalism, family and his infinite love for Cuba,'' Castelló said in a message to his staff. ``He was my beacon and model for many years. Now he will be like the magic light that shines brightest when it's extinguished -- the light of thought.''

Castañeda, with his trademark bow tie and wire-rim glasses, stayed on as a consultant to El Nuevo Herald -- a title he has held at more than 25 papers throughout the Spanish-speaking world, including Diario Popular in Argentina, La Nación in Costa Rica and Panama's La Prensa.

HANDS-ON APPROACH

''When he was in town, he would come in here every day,'' said Gloria Leal, associate director of El Nuevo Herald. ``From 5 to 10 p.m. he would be here, deciding what went on the front page, what the headlines would be. When he was traveling, he would call in to see what was going on.''

On Sunday, Castañeda called from the hospital in Portugal where he was undergoing tests.

''He wanted to know about the elections in Brazil,'' Ibargüen said. ``He wanted to know how we were going to play it.''

Democracy -- and the role news organizations play in bolstering that ideal -- was a driving force in Castañeda's life.

A longtime member of the Inter-American Press Association, Castañeda served on the Committee on Freedom of the Press, which monitors censorship in the region.

''People here sometimes take journalism and mass media for granted; here we have the First Amendment, we have rights,'' said Julio E. Muñoz, executive director of the IAPA. ``That is not the case in many countries. Carlos understood that and was passionate in his defense of the press. He saw it as the very tool of democracy, of sharing ideas.''

Castañeda lectured frequently at newspapers throughout Latin America, offering ideas on how to revamp content, modernize technology and improve circulation in often politically tumultuous countries.

''Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico -- the list is long,'' Muñoz said. ``People would call and ask for him, and he would go wherever, whenever.''

In April 1991, as regional vice president for Puerto Rico of the IAPA, he bristled at a decree from Gov. Rafael Hernández Colón to charge fees for information from a government agency. ''This is a tantrum by a man full of arrogance who is miffed because things are not turning the way he wants them,'' said Castañeda.

REPORTED ABUSE

He also reported abuse and intimidation of Cuban journalists on the island to the IAPA's 1,500 member newspapers -- working in tandem with a counterpart on the island.

''I don't think Castro would have let him back,'' Muñoz said.

Born in 1932, Carlos Mauricio Castañeda Angulo got his start as a radio sports commentator hosting his own show, La Voz del Aire, when he was 16 -- five years before graduating from the University of Havana with a degree in journalism. He attended the University of Missouri from 1953 to 1954 before returning to Cuba, where he worked at the respected daily El Mundo in addition to Bohemia.

After leaving the island, Castañeda worked as editor and correspondent for Bohemia Libre and later as the political correspondent in Washington.

In 1965, Castañeda joined Life en Español and remained until 1969. He moved to San Juan the next year to join El Nuevo Día, where the paper grew from a circulation of 16,000 to 120,000 in a few years.

Its current circulation is more than 212,000 on weekdays, 234,000 on Sundays.

NEW VOICE

Castañeda also had a hand in the early incarnation of El Nuevo Herald.

In 1975, as Miami-Dade County grappled with waves of Cuban immigrants, Castañeda helped design El Miami Herald, a Spanish-language insert that debuted a year later.

Despite his wide-ranging influence in Latin America, Castañeda never fulfilled the one dream he took with him from his homeland.

'When I approached him to come to El Nuevo, he said, `I've done everything in my life I've wanted -- except to edit a newspaper in a free Cuba,' '' said Ibargüen, who told Castañeda that ``when the time is right, we'll bring that newspaper to Cuba. That's when we shook hands.''

In addition to his wife, Castañeda is survived by his son, Eduardo, and daughters Aileen, Tanya Maria and Millie.

A Mass will be said in Lisbon today.

A memorial service will take place at 11 a.m. Oct. 19 at St. John Bosco Church, 1301 W. Flagler St.

Herald translator Renato Perez and El Nuevo Herald staff writer Pablo Alfonso contributed to this story.

© 2002 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

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