Now up to bat, the Tampa Bay Times...

From Poynter. Job cuts coming, but to 2015 levels (pre-acquisition of the Tribune and the hiring of some of their better employees).

Still, cuts are cuts. Thinking of everyone in the St. Pete area.

Job cuts are coming to The Tampa Bay Times

 

Sad, for sure. But when I read the link the headline at the bottom was a link to the story about the lien the feds have on the property. That paper has to get that debt paid off and also their high interest loan.

How much has the subscription price been raised?

 

I wonder if the Times will go the Denver Post route. The Post brought in about a dozen staffers from the News and I think most have left. The three columnists that were hired are long gone.

 

It would be very ironic if Geriatric Alley was left without a daily paper. Not rooting for that to happen, mind you.

 

Due to frequent name changes of ownership groups I have trouble keeping track of this but I think Lakeland and Sarasota are owned by New Media Inc., which is the parent of Gatehouse. Is this correct?
Are Lakeland and Sarasota at least owned by the same company?

I think only completely idiotic management could drive the Times into bankruptcy, given their monopoly status, a large and growing market and favorable demographics (lots of retired people with time on their hands and the lifelong habit of buying a physical newspapers).

Therefore I put the odds of the Times being in bankruptcy or being forced to sell in three years at about even. If that happens I think that an owner of surrounding paper would come in, buy the Times, merge it and gut current editorial staff.

 

All the former NYTRNG papers in Florida (Lakeland, Sarasota, Ocala, Gainesville) are owned by Gatehouse, as is the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

 

Their new deadlines and smaller news holes are more problematic for readers.
They just changed deadlines and distribution maps. Thousands of readers in Pinellas County, 20 miles north of the office, are getting the same paper as somebody would in Key West. There's nothing live in it. Which means no Lightning, no playoff baseball, no MNF. No nothing. Just a bunch of features and teases to the website.
Doubt this is what Sherman signed up for.

 

So we're 1 week into this new world and I can't imagine anybody who gets this early edition keeping a subscription.
That must be their goal, too, to shrink circulation. Overnight, this has become an absolute joke. I'd rather read TBT, the free daily tabloid. At least TBT doesn't pretend to be a paper of record that relies on results. It's energetic, edgy, finds interesting, humorous columns and such.
The Times hasn't tweaked anything. It's still acting like a paper of record, only instead of building pages around actual news, it's giving readers 20 minutes away a centerpiece tease to online coverage.
It's so bad, shockingly and suddenly bad. It must absolutely suck to be a part of this right now.
What really sucks is we no longer have an alternative.
They bought one paper and killed two.
If you were ever going to launch a sports-only product in this market, now's the time to do it.

 

We've all seen/been involved with cuts, but I can't say I've seen one drag out like this.
They're cutting 1-2 people a day in the newsroom. I guess they're trying to make it through the election. Who knows.
It's very much a veteran newsroom, so maybe the timing is related to weeks of severance. No idea. Just a guess.
Not sure about plans for the sports department.

 

I've notice that the free tab, TBT, is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. It was at 24 pages one day this week.

 

On the Times website the subscription price is $2.25 a week. I would think that is a teaser rate.

What I find puzzling is that the Times is in this much trouble so early after the demise of the Tribune. Usually after the second paper closes the survivor makes a mint the first year.

As an example let's say the home delivery circulation of the Times was 130k when the Tribune shut down and the Times 70K. So the Times raises it's subscription price 8 bucks a month. That is 1.6 million more in annual revenue and costs will not increase that much. Subscriptions will start to drop but it will take at lest a year for subscriptions to drop to 130K. If the Times lost the 70k in Times subscribers they could charge 96 bucks more a year to the same number of subscribers they had pre-merger that is still 12 million a year annually in revenue. For the Times to be firing people this quickly indicates that they have lots and lots of problems.