This rag may look like a tabloid, but the similarities with actual journalism end there. Not only does the Gazette read like a binderful of commissioners' press releases. It almost borders on idol worship -- the idol being Commission Chairman Joe Martinez.
Martinez gets a whopping 56 mentions in the paper, all of them favorable. That's probably not surprising, considering that Martinez backed this endeavor with money from his office and the time of four of his staffers. Even the most earnest of readers, however, may find the relentless barrage of "good news" about Martinez tiresome. Here's one headline: "The Office of the Chair Leaps into Cyberspace." Stunning!
The Miami Herald reports that it's costing $36,000 in taxpayer money to produce four issues of the Gazette, not including staff time. An additional $10,000 is going toward translating the paper into Spanish and Creole, so that Miamians from all over Latin America can read, in their native languages, the sensational deeds of Joe Martinez.
It's nothing new, of course, for elected officials to publish self-serving newsletters. Politicians who have lately taken to blogging, such as Texas State Rep. Aaron Pena and Tennessee State Rep. Stacey Campfield, are merely continuing in this tradition. The bloggers, though, at least offer a less-packaged version of themselves. They write off-the-cuff, even when they have to measure their words, giving us along the way some sense of who they really are as people. Plus, their publishing costs are nil.
The Gazette, on the other hand, smells like a boondoggle precisely because it's so disengenous. There's lots of ways to get good press, but producing it yourself probably isn't one of them.
