Journalism is more important than ever. Here's why you should support One Herald Guild

By Linda Robertson — Miami Herald reporter since 1983

Growing up in Miami during the snorting 1970s and riotous 1980s, my heroes were Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Joni Mitchell and the staff of the Miami Herald. I became a journalist because of the Miami Herald.

 When the Herald offered me a job out of college, I returned home, thrilled to write for a newspaper that was, at the time, the coolest in the country. Azucar!

 I never intended to stay, had a plan to move up to the New York Times that actually worked to perfection. But here I am, 36 years later, still telling Miami stories.

 Why? Because reporting on Miami and its cast of characters is addictive.

 When I was hired, there was no such thing as South Beach; it was God's Waiting Room. Crack dens stood where condo towers now kiss the sky. And, from the Herald's waterfront building, you might've glimpsed a dead body adrift in the bay.

 I got to be in the same newsroom with rock star reporters and editors (including two who covered my high school running exploits). As Edna Buchanan says, "Miami: It's murder." What a dream. 

 I started out covering high school football games, where I was mistaken for a water girl and filed stories from a 7-Eleven pay phone I shared while accommodating drug dealers.

 I switched from sports to news and back to sports, became a columnist. At the Miami Herald, as Carl Hiaasen says, you never run out of material. Quarterbacks throwing interceptions or a naked man throwing a severed head at a cop (who threw it back). Hurricanes and hurricanes. Heat, the LeBron kind, and heat, the global-warming kind. I went fishing with ex-coach Jimmy Johnson -- and with Outlaw motorcycle gang member "Dirty Dick" Brainard (only while covering their RICO trial did I learn that was the same boat from which the Outlaws had dragged an old lady to her death as shark bait).

 Like Dave Barry says, I am not making this up.

 I got to chase cheating Lance Armstrong up and down the French Alps and Tonya Harding around the rink. Went to Cuba and interviewed Fidel's prized athletes in their apartments during power outages. Interviewed Sean Taylor's fiancee, who described the blood gushing from the fatal gunshot wound. Interviewed opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow about corruption and drug test sabotage at the Sochi Olympics; he was later assassinated in Red Square. Beat Serena Williams (my partner was Venus). 

 World Cups, Wimbledon, Final Fours, NBA Finals, Super Bowls, Soul Bowls, Orange Bowls, 13 Olympic Games. Anorexic gymnasts and obese linemen. Donald Trump the golfer who showed me Mar-A-Lago, Donald Trump the victor on a surreal election night. Oh, and I interviewed Ali and King.

 I felt staying at the Herald was the unconventional choice. And I married Herald reporter Andres Viglucci and the Tracy-Hepburn thing seemed romantic. But mostly because I believed my stories could make more of a difference here, where I grew up, in a city like no other, in a place I love and loathe -- and could probably traverse blind-folded.

 We worked hard. He covered Elian, the Cuban boy who came to Miami on a raft, while I covered El Duque, the Cuban pitcher who defected to Miami on his way to becoming a World Series-winning Yankee. He wrote about voter fraud, hanging chads, the flawed FIU bridge; I about brain-damaged football players, disappearing neighborhoods, proliferating peacocks. 

He's won Pulitzers, I've been anthologized, together we've dedicated 70 years of our lives to the Herald. At a bargain rate.

 As 99 percenters, we're expendable. We tell ourselves the guillotine could fall any day. When my job was among those eliminated during the Christmas massacre a couple years ago, it still hurt.

 I was one of only a handful of female sports columnists in the field, and we used to have one of the most diverse and creative sports departments in the world. Didn't matter.

 I'm just one of thousands of journalists whose jobs have disappeared, sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed. Saying goodbye to talented and beloved colleagues is depressing and infuriating. 

 Gangrene is tough to stomach. We've lost three quarters of our staff and 90 percent of our circulation. Gone: Tropic Magazine, foreign bureaus, a robust features section, opportunities to grow.

 I'm thankful that I and a few of my colleagues who were eliminated in that cycle of cuts were switched into different jobs at the Herald, albeit with painful 33 percent salary reductions. Back in news, I got to create a beat that captures our love-hate relationship with Miami.

But a part of me mourns the Herald that covered this city like the sweat that covered Dwyane Wade's skin in overtime. Part regrets that I stayed.

 Yes, the newspaper business is in decline, struggling to reboot. But that decline has been accelerated by management's short-sighted plans, poor personnel decisions and inexplicable strategies, like click quotas. Instead of meeting shrinking budget goals with smart and fair choices, McClatchy, our parent company, has done it on the backs of its staff, with arbitrary math, with round after round of layoffs. They've tried redesign, reorganization and reinvention instead of investing in staff and resources, and in the process have alienated their employees and forsaken their audience.

Underpaid, unappreciated and underutilized, the journalists of the Miami Herald decided to create a union. We want to make the Herald a sustainable source of indispensable news. We have come together to make the Herald a publication where great journalists can spend their careers.

It's time to remove the demeaning treatment in our workplace and implement respect, equal pay, diversity, parental leave, job protections, severance provisions and raises many haven't had in years. It's time we had a voice in decisions that impact our lives and our community.

 We're joining a movement that is reinvigorating media outlets from New York to Los Angeles. Because good journalism is more important than ever, and it takes good journalists to cover government, crime, education, business, healthcare, the environment. We want to give local readers our best, which is what they deserve.

 Support our passion for Miami and its people. Support us. Support One Herald Guild.