But each time I travel to Miami, I think again that Allman got the big picture right, even if his original inspiration, those bitchin' bad-asses of "Miami Vice," is undoubtedly is a wee bit embarrassing to him now.
Miami was living the urban future, Allman argued in 1987. And sure enough, an American city with any vitality at all resembles that Miami: multicultural, diverse in race and age, passionate about its immigrant roots, an almost Oz-like place where dreams you dare to dream really do come true.
Last week, I had the opportunity to see first-hand a part of Miami's continually unfolding future, the journalism students who will ensure the vitality of newspapers whatever material or digital form they take in the years to come. Florida International University did me the very great, and unexpected honor, of naming me its Hearst Distinguished Lecturer in Journalism.
FIU, one professor told me, wanted not only their students but the faculty as well to hear from a close industry observer about the difficulties mainstream newspapers are having, and the much sunnier future, although one not without its own unique challenges, of Hispanic papers.
But if the faculty was there to learn, so, it turned out, was I.
I knew FIU's School of Journalism and Mass Communication by both the reputation of its graduates, who have gone on to great success in both the mainstream and ethnic press, and by reporting on it for our print magazine back in 2006. ("Spanish Lessons," E&P September 2006) In just 15 years since winning accreditation, FIU's j-school has become one of the premier teachers of bilingual and Spanish-language journalism.
I wrote at the time of the reputation the school's graduates had won for their work ethic and street savvy. I experienced both in my day at FIU.
"Our students are working class Miami," Allan Richards, the department head of journalism and broadcasting, told me. Nearly 70% of its j-students are Hispanic, and another 11% African American, an invaluable source for a newspaper industry with a shameful lack of newsroom diversity.
FIU is students like Torri, who talked with me before the lecture. The industry frets, with reason, that young people are turning away from newspaper reading, and maybe news itself, but Torri was changing careers in her late 20s to become a journalist.
They bring a real sophistication about the world, too. In my first talk, to some combined journalism classes, I tried to sketch out how the newspaper business in general came to this state, and though I may think of myself as another Great Communicator, I probably went a little over their head with breezy references to Sam Zell and Gary Pruitt. I should have recalled my own student days at Kent State's journalism school, when I had little knowledge, and less interest, in who owned what, and how their stock was doing. But when I talked of going to Venezuela with other Inter American Press Association directors on a trip to investigate conditions for working journalists, the questions and comments came fast and passionately.
FIU's j-school prides itself on taking a practical, working reporter approach to journalism, which is why its faculty includes people such as Jane Daugherty, the investigative reporter who was a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer, and Frederick Blevens, who was a 20-year veteran of newspapers ranging from the old Philadelphia Bulletin to the Houston Chronicle before he started teaching full-time and Lilliam Martinez Bustos, who also put in two decades in journalism as a reporter and producer for mainstream networks such as ABC and CBS, and the nation's two biggest Spanish-language broadcasters, Telemundo and Univision.
FIU j-students at the Biscayne Bay campus in North Miami go to their classes in a campus that, on the picture-perfect Florida day I was there, would seem to encourage lazing and loafing and inviting the soul, as Walt Whitman said. But they are being taught as if they are cub reporters under the demanding eye of a city editor. There's an approach to journalism that suggests the rigor of the old City News Bureau of Chicago, the journalist boot camp that originated the motto "If your mother says she loves you -- check it out."
I learned that when FIU journalism was committed on me. Students Stephanie Garay and Alex McAnarney had the surely unenviable assignment of tagging along with me for the day, and trying to somehow extract a story worth reading. You can see the results here.
The students peppered me with questions, the Big Ones about the industry, but also little ones ("Where did you meet your wife?" "What school does your son Desmond go to?"). Their repeated inquiries into the exact chronology of my so-called career path was not simply thorough, it was an inspiration, and a kind of reproach, for someone who's been at this for 30 years now and utters the words "I guess that's all I need now" all too often.
As a willing media, um, courtesan, I'm on the Palm Pilot of numerous professional journalists in need of quick sound bite or context about this or that industry occurrence. Inevitably I am at least slightly misquoted or misunderstood. But not by Stephanie nor Alex.
I went down to Miami from gray Chicago to tell a sometimes gloomy story of the newspaper industry. I came back from FIU thinking if the industry embraces and encourages the Stephanie's and Alex's among us, the future was looking pretty good indeed.