In memory of our colleague, Alberto Franquiz. A friend as brilliant as he was generous
If you had asked 10 people at the Miami Herald to describe Alberto “Bert” Franquiz’s job, you would have received 10 different answers — and at least one would have been “he makes magic happen.”
Colleagues were shocked and saddened to learn that Bert passed away suddenly on Oct. 30 due to complications from a surgery. He was 55.
Bert’s official title was interactive products manager. But, in reality, the 25-year veteran of the newsroom wore many hats on any given day. Bert was among the Herald staffers who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the Surfside condominium collapse. He was the force behind the online platform featuring the Herald’s annual Silver Knights Award winners. He built — and constantly rebuilt — the Herald’s COVID-19 trackers. He presented election night results and “Munch Madness” brackets of South Floridians’ favorite restaurants. He tracked disinformation.
He maintained the Herald’s servers and kept important databases alive. And when anything broke on the website, the advice was always, “Call Bert, he will find a way to make it work.” And he almost always did.
“There was nothing Bert couldn’t do,” said one of his former managers at the Herald, Eddie Alvarez, who is now a vice president at McClatchy. “No matter how harebrained the idea or tight the deadline, he would always figure out a way to get it done.”
Bert was many different things to the people who loved him: a loyal friend, a good son and caregiver to his mother, a master at Wordle and a Jeopardy whiz, to name a few.
To his Herald family, Bert will be remembered as a self-effacing, low-key genius with a generous spirit. As another colleague put it recently, Bert was brilliant, sardonic, and “better at everything than he wanted people to know.”
Apparently, he had always been that way.
Bert grew up in the Miami area, attending Immaculate Conception Catholic School and Monsignor Edward Pace High School. The way Bert told it, he found his way into journalism while working as a manager at the video arcade, Fun-O-Rama — a job that followed several unsuccessful attempts at college majors in engineering, business and computer studies.
“Between making minor fixes to the games, scraping gum off the carpet, unjamming tokens, I had considerable free time. So every morning, I brought a copy of the Miami Herald to work and would read it front to back,” Bert once wrote in an email to his Herald colleagues.
When he decided to “get serious about school again,” Bert majored in print journalism at Florida International University and graduated in 2001. He worked on the student paper, the Beacon, where he discovered a distaste for interviewing politicians and met some of the Herald editors, such as the late Mike McQueen, who became his student advisor.
Bert started at the Herald in the online news department, fixing typos and adding photos to articles that automatically published to the website each night. Over the years, he played a silent role in almost every major project the Herald produced — from the whimsical to hard-hitting news. Bert was quick to learn new tools, making him an invaluable member of the Herald team.
“He was the type of person that if you threw something at him on a Friday and he said that he didn’t have the skills to do it, he would surprise you on the following Monday with a prototype,” said Alex Fuentes, former vice president of interactive and marketing.
Bert earned the nickname “Sunshine” from a former manager, Fuentes said. And, he added, “he truly was.”
Bert is survived by his mother, Carmen Perez, and his brother, Antonio Franquiz.
Services will be held on Nov. 30 at 11 a.m. at St. Thomas The Apostle Catholic Church in South Miami.
