Monday round up

Hi all and welcome to Monday! Vanessa Blum here, holding down the fort for DOM, while he welcomes his third daughter into the world. Is that guy a slacker or what?

1. First, in the name of shameless self promotion: Definitely check out my cover story in the DBR—a scintillating profile of Miami lawyer Stephen Zack, the first Hispanic attorney elected to head the ABA. Also from the DBR (this one’s John Pacenti’s): should biometric data, such as retina scans, be used to ID illegal immigrants?

2. Second, this isn’t a federal court story, but I can’t resist linking to Paula McMahon’s Saturday article from the Sun Sentinel: Is a severed head found in Broward County enough to trigger local jurisdiction?

Broward prosecutors said that even though it's unclear where the 41-year-old was killed, the only part of her body that was recovered was found here and that under Florida law, that is sufficient to prosecute the two men charged here with her murder.

The defense argued that her body wasn't recovered and that it's more likely she was killed in New York. They hope Circuit Judge Michael Gates will rule that Broward prosecutors don't have legal jurisdiction to prosecute the case.

That’s all for now folks. I’ll be here all week, so e-mail news to vanessabblum@gmail.com.

The Sun-Sentinel *sucks*

I had a lot to post about tonight -- from Paris to dumb associates to heavy Cuban accents -- but instead I'm going to tell you how stupid the Sun-Sentinel is. That paper, which has always given the Herald a run for its money, had one of the young star reporters in South Florida: Vanessa Blum. And it fired her today.

Why?

Well, the Sun-Sentinel let Vanessa go today because it has partnered up with the Herald and decided that it could simply buy the Herald federal court coverage for its paper. The Herald will use some Sun-Sentinel coverage of local school board stuff for its paper. And on and on. Rumpole made the point about the dying newspaper business here when he was covering the Herald's firing of Susannah Nesmith:

Here's the point with the BBC stuff- if these trends keep up, local news will soon be gone. No one to report on County Commissioners doubling dipping into their expense accounts; no one to wander the hallways of the courthouse at 2PM and write about all the Judges missing; no one to write about the cops accused of misconduct and no one to write about the injustice of trying defendants over and over until the government gets a conviction.

We can function without Susannah Nesmith. We cannot function without the Susannah Nesmith's of the world. It's a scary thought that the free press is fading away not with an assault against the first amendment, but because the morons who made the business decisions for newspapers didn't see five years ago Craigslist was about to cripple their classified ad income.

President Obama recently referred to a quote from the nation's third president, Thomas Jefferson: "If he had the choice between government with newspapers or newspapers without government, he'd choose the latter." (Rumpole, I just cited to you, Obama, and Jefferson to make a point. What's wrong with that picture?)

Now, this is no knock on Jay Weaver and Curt Anderson, who are also friends of the blog, but they can't cover the entire District by themselves. And of course we have the DBR, which is committed to covering the federal courts. But while they are covering a big case in Miami, who will be tending the store in Lauderdale? What about Palm Beach and Ft. Pierce? And Vanessa broke her share of Miami stories as well -- the latest being the sealing issues in the Mutual Benefits case, which everyone is now looking in to.

I understand budgets and the crisis facing the newspaper industry. But what's the point of having a paper if you are giving up your local coverage? The whole reason people buy the Sun-Sentinel is because of reporters like Vanessa. Without that local coverage, why do we need a Ft. Lauderdale paper?

Vanessa will land on her feet -- she's smart, personable and a great reporter. I wonder where the Sun-Sentinel will land if it keeps this up.

UPDATE -- Bob Norman has a list of the others who have been laid off.