After doing some market research, The Miami Herald decided to “resurrect a time-honored tradition” and serialize a book. To address another area of its research, the paper decided the book should help attract female readers. As it just so happens, the paper’s just-departed vp of marketing, Sara Rosenberg, was part of a group of six women calling themselves the Miami Bombshells and they were writing a book for HarperCollins: Dish & Tell: Life, Love, and Secrets. Then “the fun began,” writes Kirk Nielsen in a Miami New Times report. “Herald editors, marketers, and everyone in between began plotting a promotional blitz the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the paper went over the top to hype its Hurricane Andrew book.” There were ads, features, mentions in columns, a website. However, reports Nielsen, “When the first of seven excerpts appeared Wednesday, May 25, the Herald’s internal computer bulletin board lit up with grousing from incensed editorial staffers. ‘Why are we publishing this absolute drivel?’ wrote one reporter. ‘There are plenty of local authors, of fiction and nonfiction, who really write for a living and really deserve and need this publicity. Or was publishing self-indulgent crap part of Sara Rosenberg’s severance package?'” Executive editor Tom Fiedler had to call a staff meeting to address the complaints, but he insists “I do not see anything unethical” about the extravaganza. Besides, he tells Nielsen, “This wasn’t about literature,” and “I certainly haven’t heard that people are throwing up all over the Miami Herald on Sundays.”