Miami Herald Hijacks New Times' Fly2Miami Scoop! It's the Wave of the Future!

What's a crack reporter over at the Miami Herald to do when the newswire stops spitting out 700 words' worth of cheap and easy automatic copy every couple of minutes? Read and regurgitate a tabloid rag called New Times, obviously. If, like us, you buy the Herald's bloated Sunday edition...

By S. Pajot

March 22, 2011

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What's a crack reporter over at the Miami Herald to do when the newswire stops spitting out 700 words' worth of cheap and easy automatic copy every couple of minutes? Read and regurgitate a tabloid rag called New Times, obviously.

If, like us, you buy the Herald's bloated Sunday edition for the tampon and TV dinner coupons (or if for some strange, perverse reason you enjoy wasting an hour of your weekend reading the thing), you know exactly why we're bitching: Hannah Sampson's "Ultra Music Festival gets party charter from Amsterdam."

Uh, haven't we already read that story somewhere? Oh yeah, former New Times music editor and current international correspondent Arielle Castillo reported the Fly2Miami news on Crossfade a full two months ago. Then she followed up with an in-depth 761-word mini-feature for last Thursday's Miami Music Guide 2011.

You gotta give Sampson some credit, though. At least she showed enough initiative to speak with an original (albeit pretty random) source, Miami International Airport spokesman Greg Chin, who provided invaluable and significant insight into the issue of Amsterdam-to-Miami party charters:

"That's amazing," he said. "Maybe this is the wave of the future."

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