New Times - Listings and What's-on Magazines for Miami & Fort Lauderdale

Miami New Times Container

Visitors anywhere in Miami-Dade should pick up a copy of Miami New Times, a free weekly what's-on magazine for all of the county, not just Miami and Miami Beach.

Music, Arts, Bars, Vegetarian
New Times is packed with listings of music and arts events, films, bars and restaurants – some vegetarian- or even vegan-friendly.

Display adverts include music venues, restaurants and bars not in the listings.

Apartments for Rent
In the classified ads there are apartments for rent, plus a few for sale.

Interesting Investigative Journalism
The magazine also contains some interesting investigative journalism covering local issues.

Articles over the past few years have included the following topics:

• A campsite in Miami for homeless sex offenders
• A Miami company selling cut-price computers with the Apple Mac operating system installed
• How easy it is to buy assault rifles at the roadside in Florida without a background check from people who have advertised the weapons in the Internet
• Clubs for middle-aged swingers in South Florida

Dan Savage Advice Column
A syndicated advice column written by gay activist Dan Savage appears in New Times every week, hidden away near the back of the magazine, just before the adverts for escort agencies and strip clubs.

Advice on relationships is given to people of any sexual orientation, and the topics are sometimes very explicit.

New Times Containers in the Street
Look out for the New Times cover – usually much more colourful than the one in my photo – displayed in containers dotted around the streets in shopping areas and all over the South Beach district of Miami Beach.

Just pull open the container and take a copy of the magazine from the pile inside (not the one in the plastic window unless it's the only one left).

If you're staying in an apartment block, you might encounter a pile of the New Times in the lobby or near the mailboxes, delivered on Thursday or sometimes late on Wednesday.

Village Voice in the Sun
New Yorkers, or anyone who's visited New York, should think of New Times as Village Voice in the sun, in fact the two magazines are now owned by the same group, which publishes similar alternative press magazines (or alt press) in many major cities.

Broward and Palm Beach Edition
There's a separate edition of New Times for the counties of Broward and Palm Beach, which covers the city of Fort Lauderdale.

The Alternative Press
Alternative weeklies were often set up on a shoestring and by counter-cultural writers such as Norman Mailer, one of the founders of Village Voice, which was launched from a two-bedroom apartment in the Greenwich Village district of Manhattan in 1955.

Now the alt press is big business, and New Times has a circulation of 70,000.

Investigative Reporters and Editors Award
Awards for New Times articles include a first place in the prestigious 2008 IRE awards for weekly papers from Investigative Reporters and Editors, non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting.

Sex Offenders Forced to Camp Out
This article was about a colony of sex offenders forced to camp out under the the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which connects mainland Miami and the island of Miami Beach.

Local ordnances in Miami prohibit convicted and registered sex offenders from living or congregating near schools or locations where children are likely to be, including parks and homeless shelters.

So Miami-Dade sex offenders who were released from prison were required by the authorities to report to this open-air camp, where they were kept under watch.

Mac Operating System in Illegal Computers
Another story was about a 24-year-old self-taught programmer, Robert Pedraza, who hacked into Apple's Mac OS X operating system and cracked the code which restricts the operating system to working only on Apple computers.

The hacker then set up a company, Psystar, which bought the Mac OS X software legally and installed it in cheap computers which were sold with the Mac OS operating system preinstalled for half the price of an Apple computer.

Buying the software was legal, but a US Federal District Court ruled that installing it on a computer other than a Mac and then selling it violated Apple's copyright.

Website Articles and Listings – Including Happy Hours
Check out the Miami New Times website for these two stories and the others mentioned above.

Listings from the print edition are also available online, including some information which is only available in the Internet, such as an extended list of vegetarian-friendly restaurants and one of bars with happy hours.