A decade after its untimely demise, the Miami News remains a passionate subject for its former editor, Howard Kleinberg, now an established columnist, author, Miami-Dade County historian and Orange Bowl Committee member.

Howard Kleinberg

"If every person who told me they miss the News had bought the News, we wouldn’t be out of business," he said in a recent interview. "I’m a little bitter toward this town for not supporting the News. Who are all these people that miss the News? I wish they were there when we were struggling. Where were the advertisers? Now, they’re all complaining there’s only one (daily) newspaper in town. They got what they asked for."

Kleinberg, 66, resides in Palmetto Bay with his wife, Natalie, and writes a twice-a-week national column for Cox Newspapers that is distributed by the New York Times News Service to 400 papers across the country. He also pens a once-a-week, history-oriented column for the Miami Herald and has authored three books on Miami’s past. Yet, he misses the business of putting together a daily newspaper.

"I thrived on the newsroom; I loved it," he said. "Now everything is so technical; most newsrooms look like insurance agencies. I was the kind of newspaper guy who would throw a garbage can halfway across the newsroom if something went wrong. I guess you don’t do that these days."

Born in New York City, Kleinberg came to Miami in 1949 when he was 15 years old. He almost immediately got a job on staff with the Miami News covering sports.

He graduated Miami High in 1951, decided against going to college and stepped up his pace at the newspaper. He soon became executive sports editor, then news editor in 1964, managing editor in 1968 and editor in 1976, a position he held until the Miami News ceased publishing in 1988.

"The Miami News had a hell of a staff," he said. "Reportorial, editorially, even the editing staff was outstanding. Many good people."

He ticks off the names of people he worked with at the News, icons in local journalistic circles. They are names like his mentor and editor Bill Baggs, Larry Birger, Ian Glass, Milt Sosin, John Keasler, Herb Rau, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Cartoonist Don Wright, now with the Palm Beach Post.

Asked about the most memorable story he worked on during his years in the newspaper business, he responds without hesitation that it was the assassination of President Kennedy.

"A great story, probably the greatest story of my newspaper career," he recalled. "I was news editor at the time and that’s the hub of activity on such an assignment. I worked 72 straight hours and the staff of the Miami News performed fantastically during that period.

"We sent Milt Sosin to Dallas and some of the pictures of Oswald being shot by Ruby show Sosin standing in that circle. We sent John Keasler — who everybody thought was just a funny-man columnist — to Washington because I knew that John was a great writer, and John covered Kennedy’s funeral. And we had Bill Tucker on the city desk re-writing tons of information that was coming in. It was a remarkable story," Kleinberg said.

"My first year as news editor, the Pope died, we shot somebody into space, Kennedy was killed, everything was happening every minute. And coming out of the sports department, this was a shock. In sports, everything has a schedule. You know when a game is going to be played and who’s playing it. In news, nothing is scheduled. So, you have to really be quick on your feet and quick with your mind. Of all the jobs I had in the newspaper business, I think news editor was the most fulfilling."

Kleinberg says that while he misses the business, newspapers today are just not the same, that the trend to being publicly held corporations has made them too concerned with the bottom line. And, he’s not too happy with the changes in journalism that have shifted the emphasis of news.

"It started with the print tabloids, then spread to the TV tabloids, and all of a sudden entertainment news, scandal news and smut became more important," he said. "Now, read a magazine like Time and 50 percent of it is devoted to what I call soft news — rock music and celebrity garbage, book reviews and the arts. Time used to be a news magazine cover to cover. But, you don’t see that anymore."

Kleinberg also takes television news to task and criticizes the local stations for adopting a "sound-bite journalism" approach.

"We all know what Channel 7 is," he said. "If you miss the first 15 minutes of the news program you miss every murder in town. And they can’t go through the day without a Ricky Martin story.

"But, you take a station like Channel 10, it was a good station, a Post-Newsweek station, and they didn’t go for all that stuff. The popularity of Channel 7 with the viewers forced them to change. I turned on Channel 10 last night and the lead story was about a girl who fell off a horse in Boca Raton," Kleinberg said.

"So, things have changed and I don’t know that I could survive in a newsroom today. I am a dinosaur, I admit it."

Of major concern to Kleinberg today is the future of the King Orange Parade on New Year’s Eve. As one of the 170 members of the Orange Bowl Committee, he volunteers a great deal of his time during the year to staging the annual OB Festival. This year, he’s charged with convincing local businesses to put floats in the parade.

"This community is not supporting the parade," Kleinberg said. "We are having to scratch to get people to buy floats. Our plan is to have 16 floats in the parade, but we’ve sold only one and this is the middle of the year."

Kleinberg added that the parade’s future looks bleak, that network television appears uninterested in televising this year’s New Year’s Eve strut and, as a result, major local business are not stepping up to support it. Another problem is that the media does not give the Orange Bowl Festival the attention it once did, he said.

"I don’t know what else we can do. We’ve tried to get everyone involved — the black community, women and last year the OB president was Leslie Pantin, a Cuban-American. And, we’re still struggling. I’d sure like to see Sedano’s put a float in the parade this year.