Welcome from the publisher
BY: DAVID COLEN
July 1, 2010
WELCOME. AS I HOPE you’ve noticed, AventuraUSA.com has changed. We’re no longer a celebrity magazine. Instead, the site is now a business-oriented publication, driven entirely by content submitted by readers. Our success will be predicated on your feedback of companies located inside the Aventura Mall. From this day forward, visitors can leave reviews of the restaurants, shops and other places of interest they’ve patronized. Additionally, there soon will be a tool enabling registered-users to respond to each review.
The guidelines are simple. All we ask is that contributors submit reviews that are thoughtful and contain relevant information to support their praise or criticism. Posts will be added to the website immediately. However, our editors maintain the right to delete, edit, or otherwise modify any material that fails to conform to our basic tenets. We want AventuraUSA.com to serve as a meaningful and important resource. Toward that end, we will permanently disable the account of anyone who abuses our terms of service. So bear in mind we won’t tolerate profanity, obvious self-promotion, and similarly, the placement of hyperlinks to other destinations on the Web, or language that would reasonably be construed as offensive to others.
A bit of background for first-time visitors.
AventuraUSA.com launched precisely four years ago to the day. We set out to provide coverage, in my original words, of all the “cool, hip events happening in town.” But it wasn’t long — mere days, perhaps — before I realized absolutely nothing whatsoever “cool” or “hip” happens in Aventura. Well, that isn’t entirely true. A pair of events at the Fairmont Turnberry do come to mind. An LPGA Pro-Am in 2008 that attracted, among others, the wonderful actor, Jimmy Caan, and the Florida Marlins annual casino night benefit. Be that as it may, the website almost immediately broadened its scope of content to include photo galleries and feature stories from movie premiers, charity functions, fashion shows, political campaign rallies, pre-party red carpet arrivals, and appearances by local professional athletes, throughout the South Florida community.
With seemingly countless pages filled with images of A-List actors and ballplayers, we quickly and consistently toppled the six-figure mark in unique monthly visitors. Generating one million monthly page views became routine. Then world economies began to crumble, decimating ad budgets and severely curtailing media opportunities. Hence our new business model.
Many good folks are owed deep, sincere gratitude and appreciation as we sit poised for greater achievements in the years ahead. This list, naturally, is incomplete. But great heartfelt thanks, with apologies for all the times I was remiss in saying so along the way, to: Seth Levit of the Jason Taylor Foundation; Ian Grocher, deejay extraordinaire; Norm Wedderburn of the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Southern Florida; Lisa Palley and Larry Carrino of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival; Nick Maiorana, Dwyane Wade, and DeAndré Phillips of the Miami Heat; Stu Opperman of Ambit Advertising and Public Relations; Elliot Stares of ESPR, Inc.; Christine Massa and Terry Kirby of the Touchdowns4Life Charter School; Ryan Rogers of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino; Scott Roy of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis; Angela Garcia and O.J. McDuffie of the Catch81 Foundation; Matt Heien of Eastside Public Relations; Sean Williams of Halo Security Consultants; and Floyd Raglin of Floyd Sports and Marketing.
I’ll forever cherish the generosity shown me by the subjects of our many celebrity profiles who gave way more of their time than I deserved — either during long liquid lunches, red-carpet encounters, or walk-and-talks. Notably, then, Will Smith at the Miami premier of The Pursuit of Happyness; Halle Berry at the Miami premier of Perfect Stranger; Joe Gannascoli at the Fort Lauderdale headquarters of Bright Steps; Charles Fazzino inside the (now-defunct) Ballpark Café at the Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood; Richie Booker and Cedella Marley Booker inside the family’s curiously well-fortified Pinecrest estate; Lennox Lewis at the Coconut Grove jock haunt, Mr. Moe’s; Olympian Bob Beamon at Prezzo Martini Bar & Grill in Aventura; and most memorably of them all, Jon Voight, the only one to fight me over a restaurant check after our interview.
(Voight was in town to champion the presidential candidacy of ex-New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. A genuine sweetheart of a guy, Voight listened raptly as I mentioned that his 1979 tearjerker, The Champ, a father-son epic in which he co-starred with Ricky Schroeder, was the first movie I’d ever seen with my dad, a man with whom I hadn’t spoken in three years. Moreover, Voight sat unflinchingly as scores of passersby conveyed their adoration for his famous daughter, a woman with whom he hadn’t spoken in seven years).
Back to the matter at hand. This website is now entirely interactive, save for the monthly cover story that will appear in this space. AventuraUSA.com is “for its readers, by its readers.”
So don’t be shy. There is no cost to register a user-name and password, or to browse any of the reviews. And it’s completely anonymous. Register any user-name you’d like. We want to hear from you. If you’ve recently experienced superior service at an Aventura Mall business, I want you to share it with our audience. Same for a disappointing one. We have created an open, transparent forum for the free exchange of thoughts. And we want you to be part of it.
For starters, I’ve created a user-name for myself (D.T.) and submitted six reviews, three that are overwhelmingly favorable and three that are not. I hope you’ll read and carefully consider them. Just as others will soon do with your reviews. We also want to know about omissions. Please use the hyperlinks contained in the navigation bar atop every page to suggest a new business – or to suggest an entirely new category of businesses. We will read all correspondence within one business day and promptly route back a reply.
Again, welcome to the new-look AventuraUSA.com, as we set out to disprove the troubled novelist Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’s decades-old maxim, “There are no second acts in American lives.” One final acknowledgement. To my mother. This endeavor wouldn’t be possible absent her incessant encouragement. Without her, truth be told, I’d surely be wandering a street somewhere, muttering incoherently. To myself.
