About Us

WorldCity is a media company based in the Miami area that serves, informs and connects the more than 1,300 multinationals in South Florida and the area’s $70 billion in annual imports and exports.

WorldCity produces a monthly magazine of the same name; an annual import-export publication, Miami TradeNumbers ; a multinational database available on-line and in print, Who’s Here; and hosts three event series , Connections, TradeLinks and the CEO Roundtable.

WorldCity also produces TradeNumbers publications and events for Houston, Los Angeles, Boston, New York and Atlanta/Savannah as well as U.S. TradeNumbers. The company also publishes Americas TradeNumbers, which looks at U.S. trade with the 33 nations involved in the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations.

WorldCity was founded in 1998 by Ken Roberts, a veteran journalist, publisher and entrepreneur. Roberts and WorldCity have been interviewed and quoted in a variety of publications, on radio and television, including the New York Times, the Seattle Times, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Savannah Morning News, British Broadcasting Co., the Voice of America, the Miami Herald, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, forbes. com, the Economist and others.

Prior to WorldCity, Roberts founded South Florida Parenting in 1989, selling it in 1994 to a subsdiary of the Tribune Co .

Roberts also worked for a number of newspapers, including the Miami Herald and the Tampa Tribune . At one time or another, in one newsroom or another, Roberts has been a sportswriter, assistant business editor, police reporter, assistant city editor and assistant book editor.

After selling South Florida Parenting , Roberts was able to take some time off and consider his options. Not yet 40 at the time, he finally decided that the Greater Miami area needed a news source for the international and multinational business community.

“I thought I had come up with the name ‘WorldCity,’” Roberts said. “Not long after we began publishing, a University of Miami professor, Jan Nijman , who studies ‘world cities’ called me and let me in on a secret. Academics around the world had been studying the phenomenon for some time. There was even, he said, a web site .”

In one of the very first issues, Worldcity asked the Beacon Council , the economic development agency for Miami-Dade Country, for permission to run its list of about 250 multinationals with offices in the area.

It became one of those eureka moments for the young company.

The phone started ringing with the same question over and over: How do I get a copy of this list?

WorldCity, working closely with the Beacon Council and also with the economic development agencies in the other two South Florida counties, the Broward Alliance in Fort Lauderdale and the Business Development Board of Palm Beach , decided to develop the list.

The company contacted trade offices, bi-national chambers of commerce, consular offices and any number of other organizations, all in search of new multinationals to add to the list.

Today, the company has more than 1,300 companies from over 55 of the world’s nations in its Who’s Here database, with a wide array of information on these companies.

The directory has become the company’s backbone.

Today, WorldCity uses its Who’s Here directory to find sources and ideas for stories in what has become a glossy magazine but was, in the company’s infancy, a newspaper.

It uses the Who’s Here database to nominate leading heads of multinational operations for its exclusive CEO Roundtable and to find speakers forConnections andTradeLinks, signature events the company has created to better serve the needs of the multinational community in South Florida.

It also led the company to ask a relatively simple question: What are all those multinationals doing here?

That led to a new product: Miami TradeNumbers, which provides an annual look at how South Florida trades with the world, including information on the top trade partners, the top commodities and more. It has been sponsored since its inception in 2001 by the International Trade Consortium of Miami-Dade County .

As WorldCity progressed from a newspaper to a glossy magazine, itincreased its circulation, its staff and its offerings, adding the event series in South Florida and, in 2006, publications and events in five other U.S. cities: Atlanta , Houston , Boston , New York and Los Angeles .

Kicking off the events and publications in the five other cities was U.S. TradeNumbers , which provided a complete look at how the United States trades with the world.

All told, the company in 2006 produced eight TradeNumbers publications, a Who’s Here multinational director, three South Florida event series and a monthly magazine .

The idea, all these years later, remains the same: Provide intelligent content for the global business leader.