Tampa Tribune

» see tbo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the tampa tribune sat in the part of american media history i can read about but never had reason to open. a florida-metro daily was not on any list i had access to from ankara. by the time i was reading enough english-language news online to have theoretically noticed it, the paper was already inside the decline arc that ended in 2016.

the tribune was bought and shut on the same day by its longtime rival, the tampa bay times. that was 3 may 2016. the acquisition price was never publicly disclosed. the times announced the deal in the morning and issued layoff notices to most of the tribune's newsroom in the afternoon. the print edition ran for the final time the next morning. tampa became a one-daily town after 121 years of two-daily coverage.

the paper had been founded in 1895 by wallace stovall in a city that was still built around cigar-rolling and shipping. it passed to john stewart bryan and samuel emory thomason in 1927 for $900,000. richmond newspapers, later renamed media general, took it in 1966 and kept it for nearly fifty years. by 2012 the pressure was heavy enough that the paper was sold off to a private-equity vehicle called tampa media group. that group ran it for four years and then took the exit offer from the times.

~ the dossier ~

~ the tribune vs the times ~

the two papers had been on opposite ends of tampa bay for a century. the times, based in st. petersburg on the other side of the bay, was the morning paper with the larger sunday. the tribune held the east side of the bay including tampa proper. through most of the twentieth century each held a separate city and a separate ad base. by the 2010s the ad market could no longer support two full newsrooms across the bay. one of them was going to buy the other. it was the times with the standing poynter institute ownership structure that closed the deal.

~ the day it died ~

on 3 may 2016 the times issued a press release that said it had acquired the tampa tribune from tampa media group. within hours the tribune newsroom was told the paper would not run past the following day's edition. most reporters were laid off that afternoon. a handful were picked up by the times. the tampa tribune brand was rebranded as a neighborhood-news section inside the times, which is how many acquired newspaper names get reused in the united states.

~ the long tail ~

the tribune had won one pulitzer prize in its 121 years, for local investigative reporting in 1966 by john anthony frasca. that reporting had freed a man wrongly convicted. that piece stayed in circulation after the paper itself did not, in the way pulitzer-winning journalism generally does. the archives went to the university of south florida and to public-library microfilm. everything else that had made the tribune a specific voice in tampa was absorbed into the times or laid off with the newsroom.

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