Remember Miamity? Of course you don’t. Back in 2005, Miamity was one of the first wave of Miami omniblogs. It was written by University of Miami student Kyle Munzenrieder (this was in the days before every college student had a blog or three), and had a kind of laid-back nonchalant snark that you’d still miss if you’d read it. (And you can!, thanks to the Wayback Machine, where all other links shall point.)
So, everything was going along just great, until sometime around November 15, 2009. Kyle posted a music video, written and produced largely by members of the Hurricanes, the UM football team, smartly titled Don’t Let Your Ho Go to the 7th Floor, which by all accounts is a downright catchy ode to a gangbang. The song was nothing new, but apparently the blog introduced it to a whole new batch of folks, and all hell proceeded to break loose. Highlights included national coverage, Kyle being summoned to the Dean’s office and leaving in handcuffs, Kyle posting a fake suicide notice on his blog, a front-page story in the Miami Herald (reprinted here), and Kyle being kicked out of school and living in some squalid off-campus apartment, unemployed and dejected. I’d highly recommend to investigate further, which you can do at the articles tagged ‘7th-floor-gate’ at Miamity (although you will not find the original post, which is deleted 4evah), and Critical Miami coverage of Miamity.
But my favorite part of the story jumps to the present, where we find our hero as the only blogger from the early Miami blogging scene to have successfully made the jump to bonafide (read: paid) journalism. He wrote a bit for Ignore Magazine. Sometime in 2008 he was hired by the Miami New Times, and he recently had a music feature published in ultra-glossy Miami Magazine.
I exchanged a couple of e-mails with Kyle recently, and asked him about his ongoing transition from blogging to “straight” journalism:
The major conflict I sometimes have, if only in my head, is that the blogging tends to be a lot more opinionated and off the cuff. Which could cause problems with more traditional journalism. Like, just as an example I’d love to sit down and pick someone like Marco Rubio’s brain, but I doubt with everything I’ve written about him online he’d let me.
You probably can’t catch Kyle on his new blog, because it also apprears abandoned, but you can find him on the twitter. Good show, eh?
First wave, Alesh? Really? I mean, not to take anything away from newcomers like you and Kyle, who have both provided outstanding work, but Fanless started in April of 1999, Hidden City in October of 1999, and Discourse in June of 1998. And that doesn’t even acknowledge the LJ and hosted blogs of the period.
1. The Wayback link is way cool. How does that work? No, don’t tell me. It’s probably even more complicated than a Thermos bottle.
2. Fix your date for Kyle’s troublesome post. It wasn’t 11/15/09. That hasn’t happened yet, and may never, if what I hear on wingnut radio is true.
3. You were missed tonight at the Art and Culture Center. A board member (who will not be ID’d here) got a little drunk and started pawing at one of the guests. Both female. I did my best to convince them both to come home with me, but no luck.