BROOKE GLADSTONE: This week, The Miami Herald Publishing Company was caught in an intramural dust-up. After just 14 months on the job, publisher Jesus Diaz resigned. He wrote in a letter to readers that he mismanaged the firing last month of three reporters at El Nuevo Herald, the company's Spanish-language daily. The reporters were making paid appearance on radio and TV Marti, U.S. government-funded anti-Castro propaganda outlets. But Diaz said it hadn't been made clear to the reporters that they couldn't work both for the newspaper and the government, so Diaz asked the reporters to return, and then resigned himself. We asked Dan Grech, a former Miami Herald employee, now working for Marketplace, to explain what went wrong this week in Miami.

DAN GRECH: Publisher Jesus Diaz oversaw two newspapers – The Miami Herald, of course, and El Nuevo Herald, the highest-circulation Spanish-language newspaper in the United States. Diaz was forced to resign this week in large part because he had lost the confidence of both newsrooms. That erosion begin last summer, just nine days into Diaz' tenure as publisher. On July 27th, 2005, Miami Herald columnist Jim DeFede interviewed a distraught Miami City commissioner. DeFede made a rash decision to tape the conversation without telling the commissioner, which is illegal in Florida. Minutes later, the commissioner shot himself in the head in The Miami Herald lobby. DeFede took the tapes to his bosses at The Herald and asked what he should do. Jesus Diaz fired him on the spot.

JIM DeFEDE: The night that I was fired, Jesus Diaz walked down to the newsroom – this was told to me by several people – and they said, why did a decision have to be made so quickly? Why did it have to be made right now? And Jesus Diaz' exact words – and several people wrote them down – was, "We needed to distance ourselves from him as quickly as possible."

DAN GRECH: Last month, it was El Nuevo Herald's turn. Diaz quickly fired three El Nuevo journalists who worked on the side for Radio Marti. It later emerged that a total of eight staffers and 29 freelancers made paid appearances on Radio or TV Marti since 2001. Diaz admitted in a note to readers that the paper's conflict of interest policy was, quote, "ambiguously communicated, inconsistently applied and widely misunderstood." He invited the three fired journalists back. The final straw came when he tried to kill a September 17th column by Carl Hiaasen about the El Nuevo firings. Hiaasen was interviewed Tuesday by NPR News.

CARL HIAASEN: I was told that my column was going to be fuel on the fire, and my response was, who cares? Since when do I worry about what the circulation numbers are? And when they told me my column wasn't going to run, my response was that you'll have my resignation in the morning.

DAN GRECH: The Miami Herald's new owner, the McClatchy Company, was forced to step in. They sided with the columnist. As for Jesus Diaz, the writing was on the wall. Former columnist, Jim DeFede.

JIM DeFEDE: The role of a publisher should be to back your reporters, to be supportive of the people you're in the trenches with. And Jesus Diaz's mentality was always to throw those people under the bus.

DAN GRECH: I couldn't reach Diaz for comment, but a bigger, more complicated media story emerged in the days following his resignation – the conflict in values between The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald. The two newspapers may share the same building and the same publisher, but they have fundamentally different approaches to journalism. The Miami Herald, like most U.S. newspapers, prizes objectivity. El Nuevo Herald is more like papers in Latin America and Europe that push for social change. El Nuevo has many staffers who fled Fidel Castro's Cuba. Several had been political prisoners. Those reporters who went on Radio Marti were passionate advocates for regime change long before they freelanced for the U.S. government program. Miami sociologist Dario Moreno says the fired El Nuevo reporters felt they were suddenly being held to a different standard – the standard of The Miami Herald.

DARIO MORENO: If your paper is taking the Latin American tradition of an ideological newspaper, and people at El Nuevo knew it, what was the violation of journalistic ethics?

DAN GRECH: For evidence of this different standard, consider a photo El Nuevo published in June. It appeared to show Cuban police ignoring prostitutes as the prostitutes solicited a tourist. But it was a fake, a crude mash-up of two separate images. This is the sort of thing that gets journalists fired at other papers. But in a note to readers, El Nuevo called it "un fotomontaje artistico," an artistic photomontage, and no one was punished. Humberto Castello is the editor of El Nuevo Herald. He says he's trying to move his reporters away from the advocacy journalism that once defined the paper. He says he didn't know some of his staffers were also getting paid by Radio and TV Marti.

HUMBERTO CASTELLO: I never give them permission, and I never was told about the situation.

DAN GRECH: Several staffers say they had permission to work for Marti from Castello's predecessor, Carlos Castaneda, who died in 2002. Castello says his paper publishes negative stories about Fidel Castro because that reflects the reality in Cuba.

HUMBERTO CASTELLO: We have nothing good to say about him, no, or the way that the Cubans live. But that's not advocacy. You know, that's a position that reflects what is happening in this part of the world.

DAN GRECH: For years, the newsrooms of The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald have clashed. When I was at The Herald, we sometimes kept sensitive stories out of early editions of the paper so El Nuevo reporters wouldn't leak them to the local Cuban community. This clash was evident on September 8th, when a page-one story by the Miami Herald outed the El Nuevo reporters as working for Radio Marti. Mugshots of the suspect reporters accompanied the piece. Sociologist Dario Moreno.

DARIO MORENO: This relationship has been a culture clash over the last 26 years, and I think this is just the latest incident.

DAN GRECH: That culture clash was on clear display the afternoon of Diaz's resignation. The company called a meeting in the cafeteria for both newsrooms. The Herald's executive editor, Tom Fiedler, said under no circumstances can his reporters appear on Radio or TV Marti. El Nuevo's Castello said his reporters can appear – just not for money. So what's The Herald's policy? I posed that question to the man who replaced Diaz as The Herald's publisher, David Landsberg.

DAVID LANDSBERG: Quite frankly, we haven't come to a total conclusion yet. I think we need to spend the next couple of weeks really thoughtfully thinking about the question and deciding which cases could be a conflict and which ones would not.

DAN GRECH: Can two newsrooms with different ethical standards continue to live under one roof? Landsberg says no.

DAVID LANDSBERG: So we may be producing different products for different markets, but we want to come to the table with the same ethics and principles. We generally don't want to be advocating things in the newspaper. We want to be reporting on them.

DAN GRECH: Landsberg has inherited an almost intractable situation. Top on his to-do list?

DAVID LANDSBERG: I'm about 60 or 70% capable in Spanish, so yo entendio mucho.

DAN GRECH: Become fluent in Spanish. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] For On the Media, I'm Dan Grech. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]