Tampa reaction: Not good

As long as you are lovely and talented, you can get away with anything...

 

My heart's all a-Twitter.

 

Right now, the Tampa paper is, in my opinion, the worst major-market newspaper in the country.

That's not a reflection on the sports staff, which has several outstanding reporters, but the paper as a whole is just awful.

 

Papers do surveys on readership by section. And if you glanced at the section once in a month or so, it counts. So Sports will generally be about 50-60 percent at most places and Features and Metro might be 80-90 percent.

What skews it is that 40-50 percent of the readers just don't care about sports and won't look at the section, but most folks will at least read the comics or look at the obits or check movie listings even if they don't read a story in those sections.

But the people that read sports often devour it so the data is really screwed.

 

That's saying something -- Mr. Jacksonville Hater!

 

I also think a single-section paper renders impossible how many people actually read the paper — sitting at the breakfast table with his/her spouse. With a single section, there's no "hand me the sports section, you can have the front" dynamic.

 

If I'm not mistaken, Jacksonville hasn't had any layoffs. My hatred of Gene Frenette will never die, but as I've said on numerous other threads, the last few times I've picked up the T-U, I've been impressed.

I'm guessing the Tampa paper folds within five years. I love Fennelly and Marc Lancaster and both of their Bucs writers, but this paper is a rag compared to what it was just a few years ago.

It's really sad.

 

How's this for a scary line from the EE/VP:

"The Tribune has always been a strong sports paper, and that is a distinction for us. But the changes we’ve been making for the last year have tipped sports out of balance with the rest of the newspaper. While sports remains important, in a world where the economy is imploding and a presidential election is upon us, we’ve overemphasized that part of our content."

That sounds like management speak for "sports' resources are out of balance with the realities of our situation, so they should have less." Scary thought.

 

Hasn't Oklahoma City held the banner of worst big-market paper in America? Funny that the bottom dwellers are "reinventing" themselves so thoroughly.