It’s been an interesting month-and-a-half for the Tampa Bay Times. The daily recently cut its print frequency to twice a week and (with its related companies) recently received a loan of $8.5 million as part of the Paycheck Protection Program. Last week, its editors—all irked about what they felt was disrespect to Sports Editor Traci Johnson—got into some Twitter drama with a Washington Post media writer (the writer changed his lede and still got flack from Times staffers, including executive editor Mark Katches).
Today, however, takes the cake. As The Appeal (and former Miami New-Times) reporter Jerry Iannelli pointed out, “Someone just hacked the @TB_Times and sent out this push alert:”
It shows a Tampa Bay Times app phone push notifications simply captioned, “look a fucking title.”
(Iannelli deleted his original post for clarity's sake, saying "Update, appears it was not a hack of the TBT in and of itself.)
When you click through, you see what appears to be a headline that says the same thing, along with a thumbnail of a “Fake News” paper with the text “Turtle Fake News" (we would've used this image, made right here in Tampa Bay by Conrad Garner.)
“An explicit push was recently sent out from our mobile app but not from Tampa Bay Times journalists. We are looking into this issue and apologize for the profanity,” the Times wrote on Twitter.
In a web post, Katches said the alert was sent by an employee of a Times technology vendor Naviga, which papers use to send push notifications to audiences. Katches wrote that Naviga was testing a news alert system.
"It was not sent by a Times employee and it came without warning or consultation with us," Katches added. "We have alerted the company and are in vigorous conversations with them to prevent any recurrence."
The good news is that this wasn't a hack job because in January the paper was attacked by ransomware.
And you trolls thought our headlines sucked.
https://t.co/BqAFIb3AwX https://t.co/Att1TLIbcf
— Jerry Iannelli (@jerryiannelli) May 18, 2020
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