The Miami Herald: A mini-newspaper within the newspaper
The Miami Herald in Florida premiered its new design Sept. 15, to coincide with its 100th birthday. It introduced the innovative and revolutionary concept of the “Five Minute Herald.” Originally scheduled to be the “10 Minute Herald,” the concept changed to five minutes after some focus group participants revealed that, “in Miami, 10 minutes could be a relationship.” And, as we learned, “relationships” between readers and newspapers tend to be even shorter than that.
The Five Minute Herald is a big success; it is the “newspaper within the newspaper” concept, in tabloid format, inside a broadsheet. It is written and edited by one journalist, to give it a voice and point of view. It has spilled over successfully into the newspaper’s Web site — perhaps the first documented example of a concept created exclusively for print, which finds its way successfully into that other faster medium of the Internet.
The Herald is also perhaps the first American newspaper to publish with a “three-track” readership in mind: the devoted reader (give me the substance, and lots of it, page by page), the scanner (give me good headlines and summaries), and the supersonic (can I have it all in five minutes?).