newspapers - News - The Coastal Star2024-03-29T15:04:32Zhttps://thecoastalstar.com/profiles/blogs/feed/tag/newspapersEditor's Note: Challenges of 2020 have us looking forward to 2021https://thecoastalstar.com/profiles/blogs/editor-s-note-challenges-of-2020-have-us-looking-forward-to-20212020-12-30T17:04:44.000Z2020-12-30T17:04:44.000ZThe Coastal Starhttps://thecoastalstar.com/members/TheCoastalStar<div><p><strong>By Mary Kate Leming, Editor</strong></p>
<p>Most years at this time we’d be planning our annual Coastal Star holiday party. We like to kick off the new year by getting everyone who works for the newspaper together for an afternoon of socializing. </p>
<p>Many have worked together in years past at other publications, but now seldom see each other in our distributed work environment. </p>
<p>Missing this annual gathering is difficult. Zoom is good for many things, but can’t replace chatting one-on-one with people you like and respect.</p>
<p>And 2020 was a difficult year for everyone at <em>The Coastal Star</em>. </p>
<p>Beyond basic COVID-19 fears have come cancer and hospitalizations and loss. Siblings, parents, children and grandchildren are far away. The additional freelance work on which our employees depend has dwindled, leaving those not on pensions struggling with finances.</p>
<p>When people miss deadlines, or file lifeless stories or break down in tears during the editing process, I reach into my management toolkit for extra patience. I realize everyone is struggling.</p>
<p>The process of reporting — never easy — became far more difficult in 2020.</p>
<p>None of us is immune from the stress we lived through this past year. And now, covering remote meetings is proving to be a new, difficult challenge. Reporters are often stuck streaming bad audio or relying on town hall recordings acquired days after an in-person meeting; I can’t safely require anyone who works for me to attend an indoor gathering. </p>
<p>So instead of a holiday party (at least until much later in the year), I’d like to use this space to recognize everyone who works to pull together this newspaper each month: You are an amazing and talented team. Thank you for your commitment to providing the best news and information to our coastal communities, both in print and online. </p>
<p>And thank you to our readers for your words of encouragement, and our advertisers for financially supporting the paper this past year. </p>
<p>Here’s to better times in 2021. Happy New Year!</p>
<p>If you’d like to support our journalism efforts with a tax-free donation, please visit <a href="https://fpf.column.us/the-coastal-star">https://fpf.column.us/the-coastal-star</a>.</p></div>Gulf Stream: Author leaves young readers eager for morehttps://thecoastalstar.com/profiles/blogs/gulf-stream-author-leaves-young-readers-eager-for-more2016-06-01T17:52:20.000Z2016-06-01T17:52:20.000ZThe Coastal Starhttps://thecoastalstar.com/members/TheCoastalStar<div><p style="text-align:center;"><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}7960654280,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img width="500" class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}7960654280,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="7960654280?profile=original" /></a><em>Miami Herald columnist and novelist Carl Hiaasen gave students</em></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><em>at Gulf Stream School advice on how best to become a writer.</em></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><strong>Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star</strong></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"></p>
<p style="text-align:left;"><strong>By Ron Hayes<br /><br /></strong> “The job of a writer is to entertain,” the writer began. “If you can’t tell a story and keep people turning a page, you’re unemployed.”<br /> And then Carl Hiaasen entertained them.<br /> For more than an hour, the best-selling novelist and <em>Miami Herald</em> columnist sat on the edge of a stage in the Gulf Stream School, telling tales and dispensing advice to about 100 upper school students.<br /> “When I was your age,” he recalled, “I used to keep journals. We called them diaries back then, and I would write down stuff that happened every day. Sports and fishing. It taught me every single day to type out a few paragraphs. Your writing gets better.”<br /> He gave them a peek at how his books are made. He cracked sly jokes and named his own favorite writers. He shared tales from his boyhood, growing up in suburban Fort Lauderdale back in the early ’60s. He told them about the neighborhood bully who terrified him on the way home from school back then.<br /> And like those witty and preposterous Florida yarns that have put his novels for both adults and kids on best-seller lists, Hiaasen seasoned the entertainment with a serious message, this time about the importance of reading and writing.<br /> “The internet is all about content,” he reminded the students, “and if you can’t write, you can’t contribute to the content of the internet. You have to know how to communicate, and the best way to learn how to write is to read like crazy. I know a lot of writers, and they were all readers as kids.”<br /> He began to write at the age of 6, Hiaasen recalled, when he was given a typewriter.<br /> “A typewriter is a machine that looks a lot like a computer,” he said with a straight face, “and I thought, What job can I get where I get to write every day?”<br /> And so in time he became a reporter at <em>The Miami Herald</em>, where Christie Evans, a fifth-grade English teacher at the school, was once a colleague. Hiaasen’s visit to the school was a personal favor.<br /> “Working at newspapers helped me in writing,” he said. “Every day it’s something different, and you have to write fast. You had deadlines, and editors who were brutally honest. There’s no such thing as writer’s block in a newsroom. If you have writer’s block in the newsroom, you’ll get unemployment block.”<br /> And then he entertained their questions.<br /> Asking a writer to name his favorite book is like asking a dad which of his kids he loves best, he warned. “But for sentimental reasons, I like <em>Hoot</em> because it’s the first book for kids and I didn’t know if I could do it.”<br /> What Hiaasen calls his “kid books” have one-word titles — <em>Hoot</em>, <em>Flush</em>, <em>Chomp</em> — to distinguish them from his “grown-up books” — <em>Tourist Season</em>, <em>Basket Case</em>, <em>Bad Monkey</em> — so they won’t be confused.<br /> “I didn’t want some kid picking them up by accident and reading them,” he said. “Plus the cover artists like shorter titles.”<br /> His favorite writers? J.D. Salinger. Kurt Vonnegut. Thomas McGuane. Graham Greene. And of course, the late, great Florida storyteller, John D. MacDonald, whose Travis McGee mysteries took place right there in Fort Lauderdale. “That was the first time I’d read a published book where I knew all the streets,” he said.<br /> And if Hiaasen hadn’t become a writer?<br /> “I don’t know,” he mused. “At one point I wanted to be a vet, but then I found out you had to take science classes.”<br /> His old neighborhood in Plantation, out on the edge of the Everglades, inspired <em>Hoot</em>, the Newbery Medal-winning novel about kids who fight to save some burrowing owls from a developer.<br /> “Now the whole area where I grew up is under concrete and asphalt,” he said. “In real life, we weren’t able to save the owls.”<br /> The owls are gone, but so is the neighborhood bully who used to make his life a nightmare: “After a while I got to be taller than her and she left me alone after that.”<br /> The students’ hands were still raised high, questioners begging to be recognized, when Evans stepped forward to announce that time was up. A line formed in front of the stage, and Hiaasen started signing copies of his books.<br /> Some of the students carried his kid books and a few the grown-up novels. Pierce Silver, 13, a seventh-grader from Boynton Beach, got his copy of <em>Sick Puppy</em> autographed.<br /> “To Pierce,” Hiaasen wrote, then scrawled his signature and a personal message.<br /> Like the titles of his grown-up novels, the message was only two words:<br /> “Keep Reading.”<strong><br /><br /></strong><em>Carl Hiaasen’s new novel for grown-ups, Razor Girl, will be available Sept. 6. </em></p></div>Letter to the Editor: 'Coastal Star' a shining lighthttps://thecoastalstar.com/profiles/blogs/letter-to-the-editor-coastal-star-a-shining-light2016-05-04T18:14:27.000Z2016-05-04T18:14:27.000ZThe Coastal Starhttps://thecoastalstar.com/members/TheCoastalStar<div><p> I have been a resident of Palm Beach County since 1973, from West Palm Beach to Boca Raton, and in that time I have seen dozens of smaller newspapers come and go. <br /> I would like to give you a compliment: You and your team are doing a great job with the layout, content and distribution of <em>The Coastal Star</em>. Your passion shows in the quality of your newspaper, and we, the readers, really appreciate it. <br /> The icing on the cake is, I was at The Colony Hotel in Palm Beach for brunch on Sunday, where for generations the Palm Beach “Shiny Sheet” was an institution. However this time I saw <em>The Coastal Star</em> there instead.<br /> Congratulations.<br /><em>Giovanni Marquez</em><br /><em>Boynton Beach</em></p></div>Editorial: Summer is all about numbershttps://thecoastalstar.com/profiles/blogs/editorial-summer-is-all-about2011-06-01T18:03:03.000Z2011-06-01T18:03:03.000ZMary Kate Leminghttps://thecoastalstar.com/members/MaryKateLeming769<div>I spent a lovely, breezy evening this past month riding on a golf cart counting trailers in Briny Breezes. Although the U.S. Census counted 800 housing units in the community, my detailed accounting found 484 — not counting bath houses, public buildings or empty lots. <br />Go figure.<br /> I spent a lot of time doing just that — figuring — this past month. May was one for the numbers: sea turtles, property tax rates, budget workshops, special assessments, hurricane projections and even the latest circulation numbers for Florida’s daily newspapers.<br /> The upshot of all this number crunching? Some good news, some bad.<br /> Sea turtles: Although most of the nests counted are north of Riviera Beach, the county is seeing a trend toward more sea turtle nesting along our beaches. In Ocean Ridge alone there have already been 25 more nests counted than at this time last year. By all accounts, that’s good news.<br /> Taxes and budgets: When it comes to tax rates, budgeting workshops and special assessments, it’s better that you read a complete account than depend on me to summarize. Please check out Tim O’Meilia’s excellent tax rate story on Page 1, Margie Plunkett’s Lantana budget story on Page 15, and Steve Plunkett’s Gulf Stream special assessment story on Page 14. <br /> Hurricane season: I’m usually numb to hurricane predictions this time of year, since they are always revised before we get into the heart of the season. Still, it’s June and we should all be thinking about our evacuation plans. If the La Niña theory is accurate, we should be spared the worst until the later part of the season. But as we know, it only takes one. Be prepared.<br /> Newspapers: Although the ABC service that audits daily newspapers has become more flexible in what can be counted as circulation, the numbers continue spiraling downward. That’s bad news (no pun intended) for daily newspapers. So, unless small, independent community papers like The Coastal Star can survive, the number of reporters on the street dwindles as the daily papers shrink. That’s bad because to make good decisions, we need good information. <br /> So, as you make business decisions about how to reach your customers, please consider your local newspaper. When you do, I hope you’ll consider The Coastal Star — even if the editor is a little number-challenged from time to time.<br /><br /><em>— Mary Kate Leming, editor</em><br /><br /></div>