The Political Whore

I was on vacation last week when I got an e-mail from a former Tampa Tribune reporter, pointing out that the Tallahassee Democrat had reported that our former print journalism home (I was a staff writer there from 1988-1992) was going to soon cease publishing on newsprint in favor of an online-only presence in tbo.com:

The Christian Science Monitor quit being a newspaper: It will publish online only. Reportedly, the Tampa Tribune will follow suit in January.

I was flabbergasted. Not because of the idea of something drastic happening to the print product (which just about everyone in the business that I speak with expects) but because I thought I had missed it being verified. Sticks of Fire even picked it up. So I e-mailed the writer of the piece, the Democrat’s Gerald Ensley, about where this story had been reported, and he replied:

No, it hasn’t been reported. I had heard it from several people in the business and originally wrote it as “Rumor has it that the Tampa Tribune . . . ” For brevity, it got shortened to “Reportedly.” I wish it hadn’t.

Sorry.
Gerald Ensley

But Ensley’s fact error was just one piece of the Tribune’s bad week. When The Tribune Co., which is destroying owns such papers as the Chicago Tribune and LA Times, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy action, many in Tampa Bay saw only “Tribune Co.” and thought it was the Tampa Tribune that was having financial problems and heading to court. Wrong. The Tampa Tribune is owned by RIchmond, Va.-based Media General, which, while it has its own financial struggles, is not in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (Where my own newspaper company, Creative Loafing Inc., finds itself as well, to be fully transparent here.)

This prompted a full-page ad touting that the Tampa Tribune is here to stay and a remarkable front-page collaboration between Editor Janet Coats and Publisher Denise Palmer in Sunday’s newspaper. In the “story” titled “This newspaper is fighting back,” the pair hawkishly declared again that the Trib is here to stay and will fight back against the hegemony of the St. Petersburg Times:

In the past few weeks, rumors have swirled around this community and the journalism industry about the future of The Tampa Tribune. Many were confused by the Chicago-based Tribune Co.’s very public bankruptcy filing last week, thinking The Tampa Tribune is owned by the same company that owns the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Orlando Sentinel.

For the record, we are not. We are owned by Richmond, Va.-based Media General; our company is not seeking protection in the bankruptcy courts.

While that confusion is understandable, even more disturbing has been the persistent rumor that we’re going to close the Tribune after the Super Bowl, relying on our Web site, TBO.com, as the conduit for our journalism and advertising.

The Tallahassee Democrat reported that rumor as fact, and we demanded a correction. Subscription solicitation crews, working for the St. Petersburg Times, spread rumors that the Tribune is closing in January. We have asked the Times to stop the solicitors from spreading this lie.

UPDATE: The Tampa Bay Business Journal reports that the Times admits that one of its independent contractors repeated the rumors:

An independent contractor who runs kiosks in front of stores had employees who heard and repeated the rumor about the Tribune, said Andrew Corty, vice president of Times Publishing Co., which owns the Times. The contractor is not part of the Times, and the employees involved have been replaced.

Palmer and Coats then went on to make the case statistically that it is the St. Petersburg Times that is shrinking and providing less local news coverage. I’ll be looking at those over the next few days to fact-check them and give some context, but in the meantime, let’s state the obvious: the quality of the journalism at the Times is markedly better than that at the Tampa Tribune. It has been for more than three decades. I left the Trib to go to the Times in 1992 for that very reason. In those days, the difference in quality between the two papers was less stark than it is today.

Last Friday, one of the Trib’s best-known columnists, Dan Ruth, appeared in on the pages of the rival Times‘ op-ed section. Ruth was laid off from the Trib last month. Another is set to follow in the next week (sorry, can’t give names on this one yet, my source insists.) The Times has a history of raiding the best editors and writers from the Trib for nearly 20 years now, starting with premier Times B-section columnist Howard Troxler.

The Trib’s response? Nothing. It let its best and brightest (most recently, see: Montgomery, Ben) leave for better-writing and better-paying pastures across Tampa Bay. The overall quality of its journalism today’s bears evidence of those unattended wounds.

Does that mean the Trib sucks? Far from it. It is still a better newspaper than most in the nation. Next time you travel, just grab any city’s paper and compare. In our Best of the Bay Awards this year, we gave a nod to a story that Coats and Palmer cited in their Sunday piece: the Trib’s fight against the CSX rail deal. They did not mention, however, that one of the two reporters on that story, Billy Townsend, took a buyout offer from left the Tribune when it was clear that his future there was uncertain. The main reporter on the series, Lindsay Peterson, remains at the paper.

And finally, let me say how sad it is to see the wiping out of the separation of news and editorial at the Tribune. The kind of boosterism that was foisted on the reading public on Sunday might have been semi-excusable coming from the publisher alone, but it is inexcusable coming from the editor of the newspaper, who has to maintain the paper’s credibility and standards away from the business side of the publication and any marketing spin.

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