MIAMI NOIR

Miami descended into a terminal noir fugue state in 2005, so it’s only fitting that the whole mess would collapse toward a surreal New Year’s Eve with Jim DeFede — the Miami Herald’s star columnist, fired for secretly taping an off-the-record phone conversation with a disgraced local politician an hour before the man shot himself in the lobby of the Herald building — eager to serve as grand marshal of the satirical King Mango Strut in Coconut Grove. Though the organizers consider DeFede to be the conscience of Miami, he has gone, in the span of a few months, from a cause célèbre to something of a goof celebrity. Like his source and friend Art Teele, the former county and city commissioner who staged the theatrical suicide, the muckraking DeFede has proved himself to be a tenacious scrapper. He’s the writer who would not stay fired, an investigative reporter who turned on his own paper like a dog gone feral.

This has not been a jolly time for the Herald — Monday-to-Friday circulation dropped 4 percent in just six months — or for its parent company, Knight Ridder, the second largest newspaper chain in the country. The company’s largest stockholders, who collectively hold 37 percent of the stock, have forced Knight Ridder to test the market for buyers. Preliminary indications of interest were received in December from Gannett, McClatchy, and several private equity firms. In the meantime, the Herald, the flagship paper of the chain (which stopped publishing a state edition and shrank its newshole), can’t really afford a lingering pall of the sort that has been cast by the death of Art Teele and the controversial dismissal of Jim DeFede.

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