BY MIKE CLARY

Like most major American cities, Miami for years has had just one daily newspaper. But in recent months a feisty hometown challenger to The Miami Herald has emerged, speaking with a new voice, with plenty of attitude, and in Spanish. And that voice is coming from a very surprising quarter -- the sixth floor of The Miami Herald 's own headquarters alongside Biscayne Bay. The paper? El Nuevo Herald. Spawned as an insert to The Miami Herald in 1976, it is now out on its own as a sturdy, stand-alone daily that's giving the market's Latino readers vibrant, often raffish coverage of world and local events -- in stiff competition with the paper that gave it birth.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Carlos M. Castañeda, 68, El Nuevo Herald's editor, is bent over his desk roughing out layouts for the next day's page one. The choices are wide: from President Clinton's visit to India to a local study of an alarming increase locally in venereal disease. And, of course, there is Elián. Almost every day since last November there has been something in the paper about the six-year-old Cuban boy at the center of the international soap opera with the cold war soundtrack.

But on this newsy day, Castañeda quickly sees that he has something that will kick Elián Gonzalez inside the paper. From his stack of art he chooses a sketch of the exiled Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and decides it will go above the fold. "I don't think they have this story," says Castañeda, referring to The Miami Herald, whose newsroom is just one floor below. "I don't see any mention of it in their budget."

Indeed, as readers of both The Miami Herald and the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald can discover the next morning, Cabrera Infante's decision to return an honorary degree to Florida International University -- in protest over the state university's hosting a delegation of academics from Cuba -- did not appear in The Miami Herald. English-only readers would have to wait a day to learn about the flap, and even then they would get only an item, tucked inside the local section.

Chalk up one more coup for the guerrilleros of El Nuevo Herald. And credit Miami Herald publisher Alberto Ibargüen for making Miami once again a two-newspaper town.

When Ibargüen was named publisher of The Miami Herald in August 1998, he was not ordered to make peace with the city's fervently anti-Castro exile community. Nor was he handed a target figure for reversing the newspaper's precipitous circulation decline, or given any specific instructions on how to restore the paper's fading journalistic reputation.

"I was asked one question," Ibargüen says, recalling his discussions with chairman P. Anthony Ridder and other Knight Ridder Inc. executives. "Can you increase the profit margin from 18 percent to 22 percent in three years?' And I said yes." Ibargüen made clear from the start that he was far different from his predecessor, David Lawrence, Jr. First of all, Ibargüen is a lawyer and a businessman who does not think his role includes coaxing south Florida's fractious, multi-ethnic community into one harmonious chorus. "I am not a political person, and I don't want to be a player in this town," says the dapper fifty-six-year-old.

Secondly, Ibargüen is of Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage, at ease in Spanish and English, in what is the most thoroughly bilingual of America's big cities. Although he was raised in the Northeast and schooled in the English-only executive offices of Times Mirror's Newsday, New York Newsday and the Hartford Courant, he understands the Latino passions that percolate through Miami like so much dark, rich café.

So soon after arriving here in 1995 as publisher of El Nuevo Herald, Ibargüen realized that in order for the paper's circulation to grow, it had to shuck its identity as merely a supplement to and translation of The Miami Herald, and be made available to Spanish readers separately. Lawrence resisted, but Ibargüen insisted. It took two years, but finally, in May 1998, readers were offered the option of home delivery or buying single copies of El Nuevo Herald. To transform it into a real newspaper, he lured Castañeda out of semi-retirement in Puerto Rico and told him: "Give me a newspaper that cannot be confused with The Miami Herald." And that's exactly what Castañeda has done. El Nuevo Herald is a hybrid, a flashy mix of Latin élan, Cuban exile political fervor, and People magazine. It's a broadsheet with a tabloid mentality, and Castañeda says he has only one aim: "Put out a good newspaper that sells."

The selling is important. Almost half of El Nuevo Herald's circulation -- 94,000 on Sunday, 86,000 daily, and growing -- comes from street sales. Bold graphics, big pictures, lots of color and eye-catching headlines have made the paper one that could easily compete in the racks at supermarket check-out counters. And Castañeda does not shy away from splashing opinion all over page one. The seventy-two-point headline over a six-column photo of a Cuban rafter being subdued on the beach by U.S. Border Patrol agents last spring shouted: "¡bochorno!" (Shame!).

In the fourteen months since Castañeda took the helm, he has happily embraced what he calls the "People magazine concept." The formula is working. Circulation gains of 6 percent on Sunday and 9 percent daily make El Nuevo Herald one of the fastest-growing newspapers in the U.S., and has carried the onetime give-away into a virtual tie with
La Opinion of Los Angeles as the nation's largest Spanish-language daily. El Nuevo Herald's advertising revenues also climbed 10 percent in 1999, to more than $21 million.

In absolute numbers, Miami is only the third

largest Spanish-speaking market in the U.S. behind Los Angeles and New York, but the culture runs deeper here. In Miami-Dade County, perhaps as many as half of the 2 million residents speak Spanish, and that percentage is expected to grow into the 60 percent range by the year 2020. And in comparison to Latinos in Los Angeles and New York, the Miami Latino market is more educated, more middle-class.

"I want stories that affect the pockets and the hearts of people," says Castañeda. "One of the problems with most newspapers is that they're too boring. They impose ideas of what news is instead of listening to what people want. Here we cover the news and try to be a little light, too."

Being a little light can often lead to being a little silly. With an editorial staff of eighty-four, including just eleven general assignment reporters, competing against The Miami Herald's editorial staff of 425 means that the scoops don't come often. Celebrities like Gloria Estefan, Jose Canseco, and Ricky Martin have all been pictured more than once above the fold in El Nuevo Herald. "Yes, Ricky Martin," says Castañeda, only a little defensive. "If people want Ricky Martin, why not, especially if we don't have anything better?"

Jim Mullin, editor of Miami's alternative weekly New Times, likes Castañeda's competitive spirit. But some days, says Mullin, "I pick up El Nuevo Herald and I can't believe I am looking at the front page of a daily newspaper."

Ibargüen says the same thing. "I love the surprise of the paper," says the publisher. "You can't predict what's going to be on page one. That's great. But sometimes, I do pick it up and think, 'Where did we leave our brains?'"

He asked that question vehemently one October morning last year when El Nuevo Herald carried only a brief mention of The Miami Herald's investigation of a contractor scandal at Miami International Airport, a series that would later be submitted as a candidate for a Pulitzer Prize. Castañeda denies ignoring the story because it was the work of his downstairs rival; Miami was rocked by a nasty tropical storm that weekend, he says, and the aftermath was of far more interest to his readers.

In a career that began in pre-Castro Cuba and included a long stint as editor of the Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Día, Castañeda has earned both money and respect as an editor and a consultant to newspapers. He expanded El Nuevo Herald's coverage of Latin American sending reporters to hot spots such as Venezuela and Colombia. (Reporters from El Nuevo Herald and The Miami Herald are almost never granted visas to enter Cuba.) He revamped the newspaper's sections, with more graphics and color.

"Many people thought it was impossible to do anything with this paper," says Castañeda. "Well, it was never a paper. It was a supplement. I wanted to create some excitement."

His confidence is contagious. While giving the newspaper a bold new look, Castañeda has performed a near-miracle in the newsroom by cutting staff, boosting salaries, and raising morale -- all at the same time. "Carlos is the kind of boss everyone should have," says staffer Peter Katel, fifty-one, a former Newsweek correspondent in Miami. "He is demanding, but his demands are strictly professional. We are competing with the behemoth downstairs. My idea when I come to work is to do something original. That's the challenge -- to do big stories that everyone in town is going to talk about."

And it happens; David does kick Goliath's butt on occasion. In the last twelve months, El Nuevo Herald reporters beat their Miami Herald counterparts with reports on a Hialeah cop scandal, and design flaws in a new $18 million air traffic control tower at Miami International Airport. Katel scored with a story about an e-mail from the president's Cuban affairs adviser warning of growing U.S.-Cuba tensions that was written the day before Cuban MIGs shot down two exile planes in February 1996. The only occurrence that evokes more newsroom "Bravos!" than seeing a translated El Nuevo Herald story in The Miami Herald is evidence that Fidel Castro himself is reading the paper. And that has happened, too.

El Nuevo Herald's readers reflect the Latino population of greater Miami -- more than half are Cuban-American. That means Cuba and Fidel Castro are big stories virtually every day. And that can lead to excess. As New Times's Mullin points out, when it comes to Cuba coverage, "El Nuevo can be sensational, hyperbolic, pandering to the worst instincts." In The Miami Herald newsroom, the Spanish-language neighbors on the floor above are admired for their sources on the island and within the exile community. The Herald's bilingual reporters read El Nuevo Herald closely, but with a very critical eye, pointing to deviations from standard American journalism. "Carlos has turned that paper around," says one, who asked not to be named. "But is it edited too loosely? Sometimes I wonder."

In Miami, where exile politics tends to seep into everything, Ibargüen and Castañeda do not deny that both the English and Spanish-language newspapers are staunchly anti-Castro. That sentiment slips into the news columns. In its coverage of a press conference held by a former Cuban intelligence agent, the newspaper did not report that in his remarks the man favored closer ties between the U.S. and the Castro government, an idea that is anathema to many exiles (see Darts & Laurels, cjr, January/February). Castañeda says he was not aware of the omission until days later, and denies it was done as a function of policy. But El Nuevo Herald has never run editorials, and Castañeda has chosen not to break with that tradition. "Who is speaking in an editorial?' asks Castañeda. "Some committee? I prefer to have columnists speak, in signed pieces. That's what readers prefer."

Like Ibargüen, Castañeda keeps a low community profile. He doesn't give interviews to the rabidly anti-Castro Spanish-language radio stations, or write opinion pieces himself. Still, he says, he gets calls often from exile leaders who want the paper to take a harder line against Cuba's communist regime. "I am so sure of my product that I cannot be pressured," says the editor. "I am here to make a good paper. That's all." *

Clary is Miami bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times.

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