Tampa Bay Times closes downtown Tampa office

Thirty-two years after opening, the Tampa Bay Times’ downtown Tampa office has closed its doors.

The bureau, which opened in 1992 on Ashley Drive near I-275, shut down with no fanfare in the first week of January, effectively closing the door on a generation’s worth of memories including multiple Pulitzer celebrations.

In a statement to Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, Time chairman and CEO Conan Gallaty said his team—which includes nearly 100 journalists—has embraced hybrid work and that it simply doesn’t need all that office space.

“We still cover Hillsborough County vigorously and have decided on a different office space in Tampa that better suits our needs,” Gallaty, who is supposed to publish a column on the matter, added.

Sherri Day, Communications Director for the Times also told CL that the “Tampa Bay Times” signage atop the 10-story building, will come down.

The Times’ new office is technically out of Tampa city limits at 5505 Johns Rd. Suite 710 in the Town ‘n’ Country area. Day, who also serves on the paper’s editorial board, told CL that there are about 20 workstations at the outpost.

The paper’s St. Petersburg office is still at 490 First Ave. S, but it too isn’t nearly as bustling as it was pre-pandemic. “We embrace hybrid work everywhere so none of our offices are as busy as they used to be,” Day added.

The Times’ downtown Tampa office is where staffers used to overlook the city, sometimes even watching parts of it, like backyard sheds and even Ybor City itself in 2020, burn.

The office was also a mile from the final offices of the Tampa Tribune, a Pulitzer-winning publisher that’d been publishing daily for 121 years before the Times purchased it in 2016. Approximately 265 Trib-ers lost their jobs after the purchase led by since-retired CEO and chairman Paul Tash, who closed the Tribune so quickly that its staffers didn’t even get to release a farewell edition.

On The Skinny, his weekly public affairs program on WMNF 88.5-FM, Pulitzer-nominated former Times staffer Ben Montgomery noted how vibrant the newsroom was where exchanges of ideas were often shouted across the space. He also saw the Tampa bureau as the sort of stepchild of its St. Pete counterpart.

“We were always trying to get attention of the mothership,” he said. They in fact called the St. Pete office, the mothership. Like, ‘Hey, pay attention to us over here. There's a lot going on in Tampa,’ and, you know, always trying to get on the front page, always screaming for attention.”

Day, who started at the times as a reporter in 2004 told WMNF she doesn’t miss her commute to and from New Tampa.

“I always did not like to be in the car and the time that it took to get to work but I loved the people once I got there. So there is something that I miss about that,” Day added. “But I have a lot of found time that I'm able to, to do some other things with and I'm very grateful for that.”

While the Times has always had “MOJO” or “mobile journalists,” Tom Scherberger, who worked at the Times 13 years across several editorial departments, pointed out that “there's no news in a newsroom, get outside, go find some stories.”

Scherberger, however, admitted that the collegial approach to working was beneficial.

“You could throw some ideas out there, bounce ideas off of each other. That is missing now, in the remote world. I'm sure you can do it by Slack or Zoom, but there's really nothing like just being in the newsroom, and throwing ideas around,” he added. “But of course, there's also a lot of time wasted where you're talking about last night's episode of, you know, whatever TV show you were watching.”

The closure comes at a time of relative calm for the Bay area's vaunted paper of record, which has not reported any layoffs since February 2023 (past layoffs happened in 2020, 2019, and twice in 2018).

It’s not been smooth sailing for the news industry, however, and the Times is not exempt.

In 2021, it closed its printing plant, sold the land underneath it to vulturistic hedge fund Alden, and slashed 150 jobs related to the plant's operation. The move meant the Times' printing moved to the same location as local Gannett-owned papers, as well as, Orlando Sentinel, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, which still keeps a tiny office a few blocks from the Times' now-former downtown Tampa HQ. And of course, the Times ended daily printing back in 2020 in favor of a twice-weekly schedule that is still in effect today.

Last year, its longtime Tampa City Hall reporter Charlie Frago abruptly left the paper over philosophical differences. “I did not see a path forward," Frago told CL at the time.

In 2022, the feds refiled a $2.8 million lien against the Times Publishing Company, after first announcing plans to take over the paper’s pension plans in late-2021. Liens against the company were north of $103 million in 2019.

In 2018, a trust controlled by the widow of Nelson Poynter—whose institute owns the Times—sued the Times publishing company, saying it owed her nearly $7.8 million after defaulting on a promissory note.

In 2017, the Times was bailed out by an investment group—FBN Partners—that loaned the paper $12 million. The group included Tash, Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik, Tampa business heavyweights Frank and Carol Morsani, developer Ted Couch,  investment company chair and former part owner of the Washington Commanders football team, Robert Rothman, plus Tampa entrepreneur and philanthropist Kiran Patel and his wife, Pallavi. Another investor in the group—which added $3 million to its loan in 2019—is Tampa developer and former Blue Pearl Veterinary Clinic CEO Darryl Shaw.

One investor remains unnamed, but in 2021 Day told CL that the FBN loan had been paid in full.

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UPDATED: 02/05/249:39 a.m. Updated with comments from a WMNF public affairs program.