Meanwhile, the Miami Herald continued to be a much larger, and separate, operation with a circulation in 2006 of 294,000 daily and 390,000 Sunday. [1] Tom Fiedler , a veteran TMH reporter and editor who became executive editor and vice president in 2001, says there was a "determination [by management] to make these two separate newspapers, that happened to be owned by the same corporate parent, and that's the way we operated… We didn't view El Nuevo Herald as a competitor because we were so much bigger, and our aspirations were so much larger." [2] As of 2006, the Miami Herald had won 18 Pulitzer Prizes.

Listen to Tom Fiedler discuss the Miami Herald .

But the Cuban-American community, at least a vocal part of it, was convinced that TMH neither understood nor served its members. While TMH held a held staunch editorial position against the rule of Cuban strongman Fidel Castro, the paper nonetheless for years came under consistent attack from Cuban-American leaders for allegedly ignoring their affairs. In the 1970s, Cubans chained themselves to the columns in front of the newspaper building to protest that TMH never wrote about political prisoners in Cuba.

While some of the anti- Herald feeling abated in the 1990s as the generation of Cuban-born Miami residents gave way to their American-born children, there were still incidents. In the 1990s, the powerful Cuban-American National Foundation launched a campaign against TMH, pasting stickers across the city warning residents not to believe the paper. In late 1999, another furor erupted over the case of Elian Gonzalez, a child claimed both by his Cuban father and his US-based relatives. Members of the Cuban community felt TMH editorials did not adequately push to keep Elian in the US. One Cuban-American journalist tried to explain the depth of feeling:

Here the Cold War is not a distant memory and Elian is not just a little boy. He is the embodiment of 40 interminable years of rancor and bitterness toward Fidel Castro' and toward the United States government, for failing to depose him or take a harder line… Here, politicians are judged first and foremost by how much they despise Fidel and Communism, not by where they stand on education and Social Security. [3]

The same could be said about how many influential Cuban-American residents judged the Miami Herald .

By 2006, the two papers and their staffs felt in some ways like different worlds. Each was proud of its brand of journalism. TMH culture was, says Fiedler, typical of US papers: "American newspapers value being the neutral observer and the unaligned observer, free to be critical of all power." While the newsroom reflected the Miami community by being one of the most racially and ethnically diverse in the country, it was, says Fiedler, an "Anglo-dominant newsroom." Nonetheless, a significant number of Cuban-Americans worked there. Most of them had been born in Cuba, but raised and educated in the US. They thought of themselves by and large as journalists first, Cuban-Americans second.

The Nuevo Herald culture was livelier than the Miami Herald 's. "The headlines are very passionate. And sometimes the use of photography," exclaims Castelló. [4] The paper covered sports with a passion, as well as culture and politics. Just over half the reporters were Cuban-American; most had come to the US as adults and considered themselves in exile.

Superior . There was also a sense that Miami Herald staff considered themselves superior to those at El Nuevo Herald . "There's no question about it, the Miami Herald always looked down at El Nuevo Herald ," confirms Ibargüen. "I used that to great advantage when I would tell [ El Nuevo reporters]: ‘We've got to get this story before the Americans get it.'" That rankled with ENH reporters, many of whom were full professors in Cuba and who considered themselves far more cosmopolitan than the average TMH reporter. The two papers shared common editorial values, however. As Ibargüen puts it: "I think we all subscribed to full, accurate, contextual search for truth. But your truth and my search are different."

Estranged . But mostly in 2006, the two newsrooms had very little to do with one another except on occasion to run each other's stories. While it had been common during the Ibargüen period for members of each editorial staff to sit in on the news meetings of the other, that had stopped. Fiedler says he and Castelló spoke on a regular basis only on business matters, during a regular Wednesday morning meeting of the executive committee with the publisher. Jesús Díaz formerly general manager for the Miami Herald Company, had become publisher in June 2005. "I never spoke to [Castelló] about stories that we were going to do," says Fiedler. Clark Hoyt, who knew both papers well, says:

The two papers, they didn't attend each others' news meetings. They didn't necessarily know what each other was reporting, even though they're in the same building and nominally cousins or brother or sisters or whatever. There was a sense in El Nuevo Herald that the Miami Herald looked down on their journalism and didn't respect it.