After all, Tash himself noted that, like the named investors, the unnamed ones “all have big investments in the Tampa Bay region.”
These big investors probably care about their media coverage, too, so shouldn’t the public be armed with this information every time they read a Times piece covering them and their endeavors?
Local activists concerned about the Times’s coverage of political races certainly think so.
“In this age of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternate facts,’ it is more important than ever to know those who have vested interests in the coverage,” wrote Pinellas County Democratic Executive Committee chair Susan McGrath in a July 5 letter to the editor. “The article says that investors have no influence on editorial coverage. Readers should be able to make that determination. What if the Rays ownership is among the investors? What if Bill Edwards is an investor?”
Edwards, a billionaire developer who owns the Tampa Bay Rowdies and is an ally and employer of current mayoral contender Rick Baker (president of Edwards Group), has since shut down speculation that he is one of the investors — probably a relief to supporters of incumbent Mayor Rick Kriseman, many of whom believe the Times is favoring Baker in its coverage of the election. Edwards’s counterpart across the bay, developer and Lightning owner Jeff Vinik, another regional stakeholder some have speculated may have contributed, did not respond to a request for comment. Tash declined a request for an interview. He has, however, offered assurance, both in his June 30 column and in an interview with the Poynter Institute (which owns the Times), that the investors would have no sway over how the Times covers matters in which their benefactors have a stake; that the community just needs to trust him.
A precedent for this predicament is tough to find, said Kelly McBride, vice president of the Poynter Institute in a phone interview with CL. Papers get bought out by chains or other entities all the time, and one can usually find their identities with a little digging. But this scenario is somewhat uncharted territory, and it means the paper’s mission and that which keeps the paper from folding are at odds.
“The value of transparency is a really good journalistic value,” McBride said. “The value of competitive information is a really good business value. The business has to work so that the overall journalism enterprise can work. Sometimes those values come directly in competition with each other.”
But Tash’s unwillingness to reveal the investors’ names may not have much to do with what goes on in the newsroom.
“Well, I think it’s keeping the investors happy,” McBride said. “I think that some of those investors — and I don’t know this — but it’s possible that they would not have made the investment” if anonymity had not been promised.
With that in mind, observers say, consider the alternative — that without these investors the unique structure that keeps the Times independent might have been swallowed by a corporate newspaper chain, or the paper might have just gone under.
“There are certainly ethical pitfalls in the deal, but when you are facing do-or-die financial matters, keeping the doors open and the printing presses running on one of the best daily newspapers in the country trumps all,” said Wayne Garcia, who worked for numerous media outlets (including CL and the Times) before teaching journalism at USF, where he is incoming chair of the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications. “I think everyone who cares about journalism in the Tampa Bay area is glad to see this happen, to make the Times more financially stable.”
But some take issue with how the news broke: that the paper’s top brass got to write a one-sided piece instead of a reporter who would have done due diligence in digging beneath the surface as he or she would with any other story.
That anonymous wealthy benefactors are helping keep the largest newspaper in the state afloat was something of a buried lede to some. Plus, as La Gaceta publisher Patrick Manteiga noted, the story ran below the fold on the Saturday before the Fourth of July — not a high-readership day. Even with the story’s relatively low visibility, calls for FBN (the team of investors who borrowed their name from the acronym for the Times’s slogan, “Florida’s Best Newspaper") to reveal the names of all investors were immediate and widespread.
“I just think that in this case, it is a pretty academic argument over ethics,” Garcia said. “The Times is far from perfect, and I think Tash should have handled it differently, but let’s not forget how many U.S. newspapers would not do any story at all on itself taking a major loan or adding investors if they were privately held.”
As for why the Times didn’t trumpet the news with a full-blown, above-the-fold news story, it may be that the paper’s editors believe that readers see news about news as inside baseball or, as McBride put it, “navel-gazing.”
“You don’t see many Gannett newspapers reporting Gannett [business],” McBride said. “And it’s just because there’s a lot of evidence to show that the audience isn’t that interested in it. And then you combine that with the fact that it’s probably not in your own interest. But the primary inhibition is that it’s often a very small group of people who are interested in it.”
This article appears in Jul 13-20, 2017.