St. Petersburg Times = Tampa Bay Times

Re advertising: Ultimately, you are correct but it needs more Tampa readers first ... or, more precisely, more Tribune readers before advertisers feel compelled to switch. The Times and Trib have the same basic "national" ads (the Times actually has more) but what it hasn't been able to get is those local advertisers who are loyal to the Tribune. Trouble is, there are many diehard, habit-driven Tribune readers who won't switch papers because it's from St. Petersburg. Make no mistake, when the Tribune goes belly-up, that's the only time those readers will consider switching. And only then will the advertisers follow suit. The name change now is entirely about that day in the future. It won't make any difference for a few years yet.

Re moving to Tampa: That thought crossed my mind, too.

 

Tribune's 250,000 subscribers are nothing to sneeze at, but Times only picks up 30,000 when Trib folds? The other 90 percent just give up newspapers entirely?

 

Don't get hung up on that admittedly ballpark figure. It's just an educated guess based on the Monday-Saturday figure of 125,000. Maybe it's 50K. Maybe it's 100K. Maybe it's 20K. It entirely depends when Media General pulls the plug on the Tribune. If it's soon, that figure may be higher. If it's later, given the print readership trends, it may be lower. My sense is that the Times will harvest about a third of the Tribune's audience upon its demise. I'm willing to be wrong, though.

The larger point is that the St. Petersburg Times is betting heavily on the collapse of the Tampa Tribune, and its name change is entirely about picking up what historically has been a deeply entrenched readership when it happens, by giving them a newspaper with a more palatable name.

Having lived in the Bay area for most of my life and working for the last 25 years in this media market, I simply do not see readers switching from the Tribune to the Times until then. There's too much history, too much geographic apartheid.

Yes, the Tribune is losing readers but the Times isn't gaining them at a proportionate rate. The numbers indicate that they've stopped reading the newspaper -- the print edition, at least -- altogether. That's the primary competitive threat to the Tribune. Both papers, really.

The name change doesn't help the Times in advertising -- not yet, anyway. It already has the same national and regional advertisers the Tribune has. But it covets the Tribune's local advertisers -- and they're not about to switch until the audience does.

 

As a standard of comparison Scripps just bought the ABC affiliates in Denver, Indianapolis and San Diego along with a television station in Bakersfield and a some very small repeater stations that carry a Spanish language network. The cash flow of the combined operations was 20-25 million a year. The bulk of the cash flow comes from the three large market affiliates. Indy, San Diego and Denver average out to the 24th largest television market while TSP is number 14. All three large market affiliates Scripps bought are last in the news ratings in thier markets. I don't know where the televison station in Tampa stands in the ratings but given its larger market size I would guess it cash flows $10M or so, even if the news ratings are bad. If the news ratings in Tampa are decent cash flow would be at least a couple million more. So it would seem the print properties in Tampa are losing a ton.

 

Remind me to tell you a story about that guy. Survived a heart attack and was put out to pasture. Don't know if he's still around.

When I got there in 2004, the high school football coverage was mediocre to poor. My cohort and I changed the game there, literally. We jazzed up the design, had a special h/s preview page for Thursday (done on Wednesday, H/T Yesterday and all) with standings, stat leaders and all sorts of good stuff. It was great for a few years, but then when the two of us left, it reverted back to its pre-2005 format. Some things never change.

I think one thing that hurt Highlands Today was the highly speculative real estate market there that was worse than others. Just to buy a cinderblock and tarpaper shack cost you at least 200K, if you were lucky, around 2004. The county was booming, we had new cameras, new computers and a new building.

Everything seemed to be on the up and up.

Then the bubble burst and I bet their revenues sunk faster than the Titanic, post-iceberg.

You're right about a multi-million dollar investment in a multi-million dollar press not paying for itself. It's just a shame, that's all. So much potential there, unrealized. It started with such fanfare and such hope. When the doors finally close there in the very near future, it'll be with a whimper.

 

Hadn't heard "Bomber" had another one ... sorry to hear that. (He had one while he was working for me ... although I swear it wasn't because of me. A lifetime of chicken fried steak will do that to you.) Good guy. Quirky and old-school, but a good guy. Would love to know what eventually happened to him after leaving Highlands.