This day was coming. For about three decades.
Officially it was last week when the Tampa Bay Times announced that it had bought its erstwhile rival, the Tampa Tribune. Unofficially, irreconcilable media clouds had been gathering over this asymmetrical market with limited crossover readership since the late 1980s. That’s when the Times, which fancied itself more of a national player and even had its own globe-trotting columnist (Wilbur Landrey), literally planted its flag in Tampa. End-game on.
The Times started a Tampa edition and opened a prominent downtown office. They also hired strategically from the Tribune–recruiting well-regarded, high-profile community insiders such as Howard Troxler, Paul Wilborn and Denise Stengle, among others. It was like Cold War Berlin; nobody was heading east. The media die was cast, even though the Tribune made some Pinellas inroads.
Over time, the Times landed naming rights and sponsorships around town, brought in Dan Ruth who had been cut loose by the down-sizing Tribune, and eventually changed its name from the more parochial St. Petersburg Times to the region-underscoring Tampa Bay Times. It also won some more Pulitzer Prizes.
But the perfect storm of technology, culture and generation only accelerated. Advertising roulette and personnel layoffs across the board. Newspapers, blindsided by shattered business models, became an endangered species in many markets. The Great Recession was awful timing. Markets such as Tampa Bay, as noted by Times chairman and CEO Paul Tash, couldn’t accommodate more than one daily.
It was no surprise which one would go. The 2012 sale of the Tribune to California-based Revolution Capital was telling. As was last year’s sale of the Parker Street headquarters building to South Florida developers. As was this February’s announcement that the Times would now be printing the Tribune.
Yes, the Times is now among the 10 largest daily newspapers in the country. And, yes, the struggling Tribune is no more. But, no, we’re not better off with a bigger, better resourced Times at the expense of the Tribune’s demise. Less competition is never a net marketplace plus.
Sure, it was editorially conservative, sometimes annoyingly so, but the Trib was part of this city’s fabric for more than 120 years. It didn’t just have employees, it had community emissaries. A lot more than Tom McEwen, Harry Costello, Steve Otto, Joe Brown and Martin Fennelly.
Before there was upstart Tampa Bay and 21st century media models, there was Tampa and its hometown newspaper. The Trib mattered and it will be missed.