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St. Petersburg Times = Tampa Bay Times

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by playthrough, Nov 1, 2011.

  1. Hoos3725

    Hoos3725 Member


    How quickly?

    Could the Tribune be gone in a year? 2?
     
  2. reformedhack

    reformedhack Well-Known Member

    The biggest issue Highlands Today faced (and may still face, for all I know) is mismanaged expectations. When it broke free from the Tribune "zone" system and into its own business unit in 1996, it was never intended to have late news and sports coverage.

    While it would have been nice to give Highlands Today its own multimillion-dollar press and production facility in Sebring, that wasn't going to happen. It would have taken decades, if not centuries, for that decision to pay for itself. Even the competing News-Sun was (and is) printed elsewhere and trucked in. The only alternative is having it printed at the Tampa facility two hours away. And to have the paper delivered by 5 or 5:30 for the early-rising rural readership, that means an early press time. (Last time I checked, it was around 9:30 p.m.)

    Accordingly, the stated objective from Day One was that it would continue with neighborhood features and daytime government meetings -- staples of any daily zoned section -- and anything that happened after deadline would either be treated as folo or offered live to the Tribune's state edition (which went to the Heartland). Considering that the competition was not a daily and there is no other local daily in that area, this was reasonable. Not ideal, but reasonable.

    But, no, Highlands Today managers decided they would run a daily paper, by God, and cover everything as it happened. If it didn't make deadline, they'd save it until tomorrow. Rarely did they offer anything to the Tribune, with the exception of Friday night football gamers, under the premise that they needed the material for the next day's paper. And before long, you're right, Highlands Today was Highlands Yesterday.

    Despite several changes in management at Highlands, the culture and mentality was ingrained. Indeed, the first sports editor was on my staff at the Tribune, and, while a very nice guy, was still working as if it were the 1970s, bless his heart. I'm sure that helped set the tone for sports coverage for the longest time.

    The biggest failing from the Tribune in regard to Highlands Today was that they didn't provide Highlands leaders with any "reality checks" for the first 10 years or so. It sounds like you were able to help them turn the corner a little bit by creating video content and online material, and that's to your credit. And it seems that in recent years, they're making better use of the Web and using their alignment with the Tribune to cover later news. (Even the 1A flag now says it's an edition of the Tribune.)

    It's not the optimal way to run a daily newspaper, but what's the realistic alternative? I am not a fan of Tribune management by any stretch, and will never be confused for an apologist for Media General, but any shortcomings faced by Highlands Today were largely of its own philosophical making. Multimedia convergence is a handy target for anyone who needs to ventilate frustrations, but convergence barely applied to the Highlands operations. There's no local TV station that needs to be fed and the Web expectations have been minimal comparative to other daily operations (or at least had been for many years).

    While I can't fault the Highlands staff for wanting to aim high, there should have been no illusions about what Highlands Today actually is and can do. That's not a Media General failure, that's just a reality of the market it serves.
     
  3. reformedhack

    reformedhack Well-Known Member

    A couple of thoughts:

    * The St. Petersburg Times is currently dealing with what its own leaders have called "crushing" debt. As the nonprofit owner of the Times, the Poynter Institute is shouldering some of that burden, but because of the way the ownership apparently is structured, its existence is largely independent of the financial issues working against the Times. Don't confuse Poynter with Times Publishing Co. ... how long Times Publishing can compete depends on how quickly it can erase its financial challenges.

    * The Times sells two-thirds of its papers in Pinellas County. On a daily basis, only about 100K copies go to Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties. By the numbers, yes, it's the dominant paper in the region. In reality, the Tribune still has a stronghold (albeit eroding) on Hillsborough and eastern Pasco counties. At the same time, while Hillsborough County has 1.2 million people, it's not as if the remaining 1 million people are subscribing to the Times. They're not subscribing to anything. That fact -- not the Times -- is the biggest challenge facing the Tribune. (Same dynamic applies to the Times in Pinellas.)

    * The Tribune is bleeding money, but some of the ancillary print products (weeklies, target publications) that exist because the newspaper exists are healthy. There will be a day, I'm sure, when Media General will pull the plug on the daily paper, but until then, analysts in Richmond will be examining charts and graphs that compare the value of owning print combined with a TV operation and a website vs. just TV/online. Right now, apparently, the numbers work in favor of owning print ... even if it's painful to see the way they're going about keeping it alive. In medical terms, the Tribune isn't on a respirator, but it's certainly on weekly dialysis treatments.
     
  4. Fran Curci

    Fran Curci Well-Known Member

    Latest circulation figure put st. pete at 240K daily; still a heck of a figure on Sundays:

    The Times' Sunday circulation stands at 403,229, while the weekday circulation is 240,024. Competitor The Tampa Tribune stood at 254,782 on Sundays and 125,867 during the weekday.
     
  5. BDC99

    BDC99 Well-Known Member

    The Times has always (at least to my knowledge) sold far more papers than the Tribune because it has built a solid national reputation. That doesn't mean the Tribune is going away. The Tribune covers Tampa with far more resources, so that's the paper most in Hillsborough/Pasco want to read. And almost 255,000 papers on Sunday isn't anything to sneeze at.
     
  6. reformedhack

    reformedhack Well-Known Member

    The Times overtook the Tribune in circulation around 1971 or so, when Pinellas County's population surpassed that of Hillsborough County for the next 30 or 35 years. The area that traditionally has been Times territory (basically everything along the coast, inland about 15 or 20 miles) has always been more populous than the more-rural inland area that the Tribune claimed as its own. Accordingly, the Times' circulation advantage has been more a function of population than anything else for the past 40 years. But the Tribune's recent quality issues have certainly augmented the margin.
     
  7. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    I'm sure the Times bigwigs took everything into consideration, but there's gotta be a heckuva lot of costs involved with a name change. Is it the best move for a company with "crushing" debt to be spending cash on everything from new business cards to billboards to newspaper boxes to younameit?
     
  8. reformedhack

    reformedhack Well-Known Member

    That's precisely the question being asked right now ... not just by the 30 or so employees who have been selectively laid off over the past couple of months, but also by the remaining staffers who keep hearing more layoffs are coming in January right after the transition.

    As I theorized a few posts back, the Times probably isn't expecting an immediate return on the investment ... they're simply waiting for the day the Tribune dies so they can gain 30,000-or-so subscriptions from people in Tampa who are reluctant to subscribe to the St. Petersburg Times but might find it more palatable to subscribe to the Tampa Bay Times. They're betting on the long haul, but the way newspaper readership is trending, I think they're going to lose the bet.
     
  9. LanceyHoward

    LanceyHoward Well-Known Member

    Are the combined Media General print properties in Tampa operating on negative cash flow? The use of the term "burn" in the MG press release implies to me the print products are.
     
  10. reformedhack

    reformedhack Well-Known Member

    According to the annual reports, the entire Tampa operation is losing money, being dragged down by a print side that generally has been losing money for a few years (despite a few quarters of positive cash flow here and there, buoyed by such things as Super Bowls and political advertising). The TV side ain't doing much better.

    It wasn't too long ago that the tables were turned -- the Tribune was the cash cow and WFLA was a drain.
     
  11. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    Unbelievable. The more I think about it, the more expensive this change sounds like. I mean, you can't exactly put "Tampa Bay" stickers over everything that says "St. Petersburg" -- though nothing would surprise me at this point. And if you're really committed to it, you're changing EVERYTHING. Right down to the coffee mugs. Though papers probably don't spring for coffee mugs anymore.
     
  12. 1HPGrad

    1HPGrad Member

    Coming soon? Tampa Bay Times Park at Channelside.
    The Times sees what the Rays see: All the growth potential is outside Pinellas County. This is 99.8 percent about advertising revenue. Stealing advertisers is a much quicker and much more effective way to attack a rival than grabbing a few hundred subscribers every month.
    I'm wondering how long until they move the entire operation into their Tampa facility.
     
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