Beached Miami Setting New Standard For Blogs In South Florida

Above: Robby Campbell, left, and Jordan Melnick(Photo by Carlos Miller)

It was less than a year ago that Beached Miami emerged in the South Florida blogosphere, quickly carving out itself as one of the most productive blogs down here.

With quality writing, solid reporting, vivid photography, colorful cartoons and most recently, hilarious videos, it was no surprise that this talented duo was awarded the 2011 Miami New Times “Best Blog” Award.

After all, it seems as if they are everywhere in Miami, covering music, art, politics, history, breaking news, porn conventions. You know, the usual.

So the question in everybody mind’s is where do they find the time to do it all?

Or as Maria de los Angeles wrote on the South Florida Daily Blog, “Now what do you guys do for a living?”

Jordan Melnick, the writer behind the site, the guy with a masters degree in Journalism from Northwestern University in Chicago, said he does freelance journalism and private tutoring.

After all, he was a schoolteacher in North Miami for three years before he left town to attend graduate school.

And Robby Campbell, the photographer, videographer and cartoonist behind the site, the guy with a degree from Berklee College of Music in Boston, said he runs his own music company.

“My day job is I do some freelance photography and I run a professional jingle company called Write Me A Jingle,” he said. “And this is good because I can do this wherever I am at anytime of the day.”

So they have flexible jobs that allow them to put plenty of time into Beached Miami and that they do. About 70 hours a week, they estimate, not that they’re really keeping track.

Rarely a day goes by that they don’t update the blog.

“We decided when we started this that we would take it very serious, that we would take it to a higher level,” Melnick said.

Miami Natives

Born and raised in Miami, the two 27-year-old friends met when they were 12 years old.

They attended middle school and high school, even attended the University of Florida at the same time, before pursuing their respective higher degrees in Chicago and in Boston.

Melnick also lived in Italy for a year before returning to Miami.

Upon their return to the Magic City, they decided they wanted to get reacquainted with their city, so that was one of the reasons for starting Beached Miami.

The other reason is that Melnick needed a journalistic outlet. He had been writing for the Miami Sunpost, but that ended up going out of business (or at least losing all of its staff).

And even though they are not making any money off Beached Miami at the moment, Melnick believes that will eventually change.

“Beached Miami is an experiment and we’re really investing in a lot of time, but I have a feeling it will pay off,” Melnick said.

“Especially in Miami, which has very few media outlets. And they’re not doing what we’re doing.”

What makes Beached Miami so successful is not only is it a true multimedia blog, it delivers consistently original material.

A perfect example of this was the hilarious videos that they started doing recently, including the one Campbell produced with his brother during the Exxxotica porn convention and the one before a Miami Heat playoff game.

It shows that Campbell is not only talented behind the camera, but it front of it as well in a Stephen Colbert kind of way.

It also shows that Beached Miami is a true balance of two talents.

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