Star Tribune editor leaving for Miami Herald

(AP) - Anders Gyllenhaal, editor and senior vice president of the Star Tribune, is leaving the paper to take over the Miami Herald.

Gyllenhaal's departure was announced to employees Friday by publisher Keith Moyer.

"Anders has had a huge impact on our newsroom," Moyer said. "I'm really going to miss him. He has a lot of talent and he is a wonderful man."

The Miami Herald also announced the move in a story posted on its Web site. Gyllenhaal, 55, will replace Tom Fiedler as executive editor when Fiedler, 60, retires at the end of February.

Moyer said he hoped to name a replacement for Gyllenhaal by the time he departs.

In a note to the Star Tribune newsroom, Gyllenhaal wrote: "It has been a true privilege to be a part of the Star Tribune, a great newspaper that has served this community so well at the same time as it's worked to create a modern news organization."

Gyllenhaal was a reporter and editor at the Miami Herald before becoming executive editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. He moved to Minneapolis in 2002.

Both the Star Tribune and the Miami Herald are owned by The McClatchy Co.

"I think he's a talent, and I'm not surprised that McClatchy is promoting him to Miami," said Albert Tims, director of the school of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota. "I think he's the right person to help turn that newspaper around."

He applauded Gyllenhaal's management style, which he called forward-thinking and thoughtful.

Tims pointed to the extensive community outreach that accompanied the newspaper's redesign in October 2005, which included an emphasis on delivering news online, reaching younger readers and added a twice-weekly section for international news.

"Anders' interest in providing global news coverage here in the Twin Cities is going to serve him very well in Miami," he said.

Reporter Chris Serres, vice chair for editorial of the Star Tribune unit of the Newspaper Guild, said of Gyllenhaal, "the union certainly did have disagreements with him over workplace rules and allocation of resources, but we never questioned his commitment to aggressive journalism."

The Audit Bureau of Circulations reports that in the past three years, total average paid circulation at the Star Tribune fell about 3 percent daily and 8 percent on Sunday, to 371,258 and 621,841 respectively, according to audited reports.

The combined circulation of the Miami Herald and its Spanish-language sister paper El Nuevo Herald showed similar declines. In March 2006, the combined papers claimed circulation of 381,070 daily and 488,433 on Sunday.

Gyllenhaal, a Cleveland native who grew up in Pennsylvania, graduated from George Washington University with a journalism degree. His wife, Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal, writes a syndicated cooking column. They have two children, ages 15 and 17.

(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)