Janet Coats pulled up a chair in the middle of her Tampa Tribune newsroom to deliver the news to her staff in early July, explaining why 11 reporters (including the newspaper's Florida State Seminoles sports beat writer) were hitting the bricks.
For Coats, the paper's executive editor, cutbacks and financial losses mean wholesale changes in the way a now-smaller newsroom will gather and present news for consumers. She started outlining a new journalism plan without traditional beat structures or titles, a model that relies first and foremost on "audience interaction."
Getting there will be crucial, she told her staff.
"We can see a better future for journalism right across the bridge, on the other side, but the bridge is on fire," Coats said, according to an account posted on one reporter's personal blog, "and if we just stand here, we are going to burn up with it."
The reporter-blogger was 21-year-old intern Jessica DaSilva, a University of Florida student. DaSilva's blog post supported Coats' "crazy new business model" in what appeared to be a cheerleading fashion.
"Through most of this meeting, I just wanted to shout, 'Amen!' and 'You go girl!' because Janet understands what's up," DaSilva wrote in her blog. "She can see the trend in the industry: Innovate or obliterate. Janet, you're my hero, and I think this is worth fighting for too."
And then the firestorm started. Within days, DaSilva found herself the subject of withering attacks on the Internet, reviled as an insensitive young punk who can't spell "layed off" correctly. (It's "laid off.")
"Wow, you really are young and naïve, aren't you?" one commenter wrote. Another called the post "sophomoric and juvenile. Clearly you have no clue about concepts such as basic spelling." And another: "If I were your boss, I'd fire you for posting this. Is this your first job?"
She may have been thoroughly slagged online, but DaSilva's account logged thousands of page views, garnered more than 200 comments and earned a mention in Columbia Journalism Review.
In an age of new media and revenues tied to website stickiness, page views and unique visitor stats, does intern Jessica DaSilva get it, and older, traditional journalists don't?
Tampa Bay's media institutions are undergoing change and contraction as never before. Both daily newspapers are shedding staff while looking to shift newsgathering and business models more and more online. Both have physically shrunk the print paper. Both are spending a great deal of time and energy creating blogs and multimedia projects instead of putting more shoe-leather reporters on the streets.
The staffing cutbacks are the result of crumbling state economics, changing public tastes for newspapers and Wall Street's demand for larger margins than most print journalism can generate these days. At the Trib, the 11 layoffs Coats announced July 2 followed the departure of about two dozen newsroom workers who took buyout offers earlier this year, on top of a handful of longtime reporters and editors who left to take jobs at PricewaterhouseCoopers in June and 70 companywide layoffs last year.
And those cuts are just the start. Ten more Tribune newsies will be gone by the fall, Coats told her staff, and all photographers and video journalists at the combined Tribune-TBO.com-Newschannel 8 complex are being forced to reapply for their jobs. Not all will be kept.
It is a far cry from the lofty heights of the Tampa Bay newspaper war, started in 1987 when the Tribune and Times planted bureaus in each other's respective home counties. Both papers staffed up heavily, adding reporters and editors in myriad and sometimes distant bureaus. At one point, the Trib had a bureau in Sebring, and the Times ran large operations as far north as Citrus County.
Even broadcast media companies in town are changing. On Friday, Newschannel 8 announced it was laying off health reporter Irene Maher. Tampa Bay's 10 recently posted on its website, "Citizen Journalists — We want YOU!" and offered 20 people a new video camera if they contribute footage that could be aired on the station's newscasts throughout the next year. The promo included a picture of a chubby doofus wearing a tropical shirt and clutching a small camcorder, in an apparent search for news at the beach.
For media observers and readers in Tampa Bay, the behind-the-scenes upheavals have translated to a gradual diminishing of in-depth and quality journalism. The idea that both papers are spending millions on what could be viewed as luxuries — multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals such as the St. Pete Times Forum and the Times' branding at International Plaza, or the newish downtown waterfront building and parking garage of the Tribune's — while cutting back on its basic product, news, is ludicrous.
"That's silly, for the Times to spend all that money naming a hockey rink and then saying, 'Well, we're going to have to squeeze your coverage to do it,'" said George Meyer, a Tampa journalist whose career has included freelance writing, communications consulting and teaching college journalism. "That's an embarrassment. It makes them no better than the politicians they cover."
Meyer pointed to three instances where he feels that media staffing cutbacks have kept stories sub rosa for too long: the secretive deal to purchase the rights to CSX rail lines in Central Florida; the talks between the city of St. Pete and the Tampa Bay Rays, which went on for nearly 18 months before being written about; and the months of secret negotiations between the state and U.S. Sugar to buy out the Everglades polluter.
"I don't think that 20 years ago that would have slipped by [the Tallahassee press corps,]" Meyer said. "Those things are getting past us. It's really emboldening the secret dealmakers."
Others echo a concern about hard-hitting, deep coverage.
"They don't want to seem to get to the real bottom of anything," said Tommy Duncan, a weekly newspaper editor in Tampa and founder of the popular civic Tampa website Sticks of Fire. "It's disappointing, and it's important for democracy."
Editors like Coats acknowledge that there won't be more coverage, just different.
"More with less is a crock; you can't," Coats said last week in an interview with Creative Loafing. "There is no such thing as doing more with less. We're doing things differently. We're trying to make choices in print through our years of research and what we hear from our readers, [striving to] do things the readers need, and not just what we want to do as journalists."
She said, however, that she remains committed to investigative reporting. One of the "news circles" she wants to create in her newsroom is labeled "data" and includes a component for data-driven investigative reporting.
There's no doubt coverage has and will continue to suffer, though. The Tribune's science writer and classical music critic Kurt Loft departed for PricewaterhouseCoopers, taking with him 27 years of institutional knowledge. So did longtime copy editor Linda Haynes Ross and Polk County reporter Billy Townsend. Travel editor Karen Haymon Long left after a quarter-century, accepting the Trib's buyout package, as did Friday Extra editor Mitch Schaefer. Joining them was former Bucs sportswriter and sports senior editor Nick Pugliese, who said he took the buyout after a 30-year Trib career because he didn't believe the newspaper's top editors were moving it in the right direction.
"I equate it to a baseball team," said Pugliese, who acknowledges being unhappy at being demoted in the past few years. "When the team is going bad you don't fire the whole team, you fire the manager."
In the course of the past two years, the Tribune has moved away from local professional reporting in movie reviews, classical music and the visual arts. Some coverage was dropped; other beats were turned over to amateur "citizen" journalists, such as volunteer movie reviewers.
And for all the talk in Coats' plan about "hyperlocal journalism" aimed at smaller communities down to the neighborhood level and involving lots of audience interactivity, the most recent layoffs almost exclusively cut neighborhood bureau reporters, including: former metro writers Mark Holan and Janice Froelich from the South Tampa bureau, Dave Sommer from Pasco, and Angela Delgado and Stephen Hammill from various other Hillsborough neighborhood bureaus. (Hammill was also the Trib's co-blogger on its video-oriented Couchpotatoes blog.)
What was two years ago a newsroom of 250 will soon be 200.
The cutbacks and changes are much less visible at the St. Petersburg Times, which has refused to call its selective pruning of reporters and columnist "layoffs" ("evaluated out of employment" is how a few Times staffers put it). Gone are North Suncoast columnist Andrew Skerritt, Tampa reporters Amber Mobley and Sara Rosenbaum (shortly after she was featured in a Floridian section story about her unique relationship with a man who is largely paralyzed), and business reporter Scott Barancik, among others.
Beyond those there have been other losses. Pulitzer Prize-winner Jack Reed retired from the editorial board after a long career, and editorial page editor Phil Gailey publicly accepted an "enhanced pension plan," Times-talk for a buyout. A Times editor confirmed earlier this year to CL that if the company's "enhanced pension plans" don't attract enough staffers to leave voluntarily, more cuts will have to be made. The Times, a privately held company, doesn't discuss its earnings, but several sources said the staff has been told that losses run into the multiple millions of dollars.
That leaves newspaper reporters who got out before the crash, such as Joe Humphrey, feeling like they made the right choice to abandon their media careers.
"I tell you I am very happy to be a teacher," said Humphrey, a former Trib reporter who now runs the journalism program at Hillsborough High. "My timing was pretty good, I guess."
He remains optimistic about the future of journalism, if not the future of print, because of what he sees in his students.
"I still think newspapers are alive, they're not going to die, they're not going to go away," he said. "And students still have a sense of optimism about them. They are committed to telling the truth and telling stories."
And that bring us back to Jessica DaSilva, the scourge of crusty old newsroom veterans.
"I was pretty surprised at the attention and comments my post garnered," DaSilva said in an e-mail interview with CL. "While there was a lot of bomb-throwing between journalists, I'm glad that some discussion is starting to take form. If anything, at least I was able to bring a problem to the forefront of everyone's mind: People get their news differently than they did 20, 10 or even five years ago, and the industry is starting to feel those changes."
DaSilva — a candidate to be named editor of her college newspaper, the Independent Florida Alligator, in the fall — said she does have regrets about her blog post (such as not spellchecking it) but still feels it was the right thing to do.
"The only regret I have is that my post hurt some people," she said in an e-mail exchange. "Nothing in my post was meant to be malicious, and I definitely wasn't supporting the fact that about 50 journalists are being laid off at this news organization. The journalists who are taking buyouts and losing their jobs are people — some of whom have families — and I can't overlook that."
Beyond that, however, DaSilva provided a valuable inside look at the process of change in Tampa Bay media and, unknowingly, wrote the epitaph for the newspaper war. She described part of Coats' talk this way:
"Does this mean the Tribune isn't bringing in any profits?" someone asked.
"The Tribune hasn't been bringing in profits for a long time … This isn't about profit margins anymore … We weren't even in the black this year."
"How is this new model going to affect our competition with the St. Petersburg Times?"
That set Janet off on quite a diatribe.
First, she said people needed to stop thinking of the Times as competition. She said she understood that it's hard to think that way when the paper is right across the Bay, but that it is the truth. Not every story will be covered and it won't be covered in the same way the SPT will cover it. The Trib simply doesn't have the resources for the old business model.
Her editor, Coats, did not express any dismay about the blogging but was concerned about how it would affect the young intern.
"If I was her age, I would have melted into a puddle if I had taken that criticism," Coats told CL. "She's a tough cookie. I really misread how the newsroom was going to respond to that blog. I really respect her for going back and saying after the storm, 'Here are the things I have learned.'
"What she was doing," Coats continued, "is much closer to the spirit of where journalism and online communication is going than what we have been doing."
This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2008.