The Island-hopping Miami Herald   

The Miami Herald is heading for the fun-in-the-sun crowd to bolster its bank account and circulation figures.

With long-distance printing just a push button away, the Herald is producing its international edition on several Caribbean islands to serve vacationers and expatriates.

Since September 1, the big daily has teamed up with regional newspapers to transmit the paper via the Internet. By compressing the whole 24-page edition into several computer files, printers based in the Caribbean can pluck it off the Herald's server and roll it off their presses in places like St. Maarten and Curacao.

"We're becoming more of a tourist publication," says Flint Craig, the Herald's vice president of new business. "We can get a newspaper at their hotel door first thing. We're starting to redo the newspaper to be more relevant to the international traveler."

With 20 million potential readers Caribbean-bound each year--nearly half of them from the United States--Craig says the opportunity is clear. The Herald, with a daily circulation of about 350,000, distributes more than 17,000 issues outside the U.S., but it hopes to more than double that in months to come.

"Every morning at the same time as the people in Miami, we can receive a morning paper at a reasonable price," says Roger F. Snow, president of the Daily Herald, the local daily paper in St. Maarten, an hour flight from Puerto Rico.

The Daily Herald (not to be confused with the Miami Herald) finishes the press run by 4:30 a.m. six days a week, printing about 1,000 issues of the Miami paper. Snow hopes to increase that to 3,000 when the winter tourist season hits.

Once printed, they are bundled and flown on early morning flights to places like Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts and Nevis--popular tourist destinations that were previously not served by a daily U.S. paper. And, if they were, the costs were prohibitive: The Sunday editions of some papers, shipped to some islands, sell for several dollars per copy and often arrive days late. The newsstand price of the daily Miami Herald varies from 50 cents to a dollar, depending on the market.

Though the edition carries some local stories about Miami, the newspaper is international in focus. The Herald's overseas version debuted in 1946 and was called the "Clipper" edition because it would be printed in Miami and then flown to the islands. In 1996, the edition was expanded using satellite transmission and since then has been printed in the Bahamas, Cancun and the Dominican Republic.

Distributing the paper in the new markets poses challenges. On the small island of Nevis, about 50 miles south of St. Maarten, Diana Whyte, a young woman who distributes the Daily Herald each morning, now is in charge of the Miami Herald as well. Once she drops her kids off at school, she heads for the airport to wait for the arrival of the 9:30 a.m. flight of Windward Airways, a 19-seat island hopper from St. Maarten. Along with the baggage of anxious golfers and sun-worshipers are piles of Daily Heralds and Miami Heralds.

From the backseat of her car, Whyte delivers the papers store to store and hotel to hotel, bumping along the island's pothole-riddled main road. But sometimes there are troubles. Storms can prevent the plane from flying, and on one recent morning, heavy rains flooded out the only road to the airport. The papers didn't make it into the stores at all.

So what's in this deal for the Caribbean partners? The island papers can sell a limited amount of ad space in the Miami Herald and pocket the revenue, as well as the revenue from paper sales. For the Miami Herald? It foresees selling ads to businesses that want to target affluent Caribbean travelers. The Herald also gives advertising credits to island hotels that buy papers to distribute to their guests.

Tiny islands can mean big business for the Herald. Says Craig: "This is one of the largest opportunities the Herald has had to grow, both in profit and in circulation."