TRIButes: Tribune (and Times) alums on the way it was.

As Kate Bradshaw reports in our cover story, Tampa Tribune employees were stunned on May 3 to learn not only that the paper had been sold to the Tampa Bay Times, but that they weren’t going to be given the chance to put together a farewell issue. The following essays from Trib alums were commissioned by CL — including a piece by Bradshaw herself. —David Warner

Wayne Garcia

The St. Petersburg Times was always the better paper. When I came to the area in 1988 to be part of the brand-new newspaper war between the Times and the Tampa Tribune, even the most ardent Trib-ster had to know that the Times was better, with better pay, more money, more reporting power. Many of us wanted to get to the Times. Some of us did.

But the Tribune was scrappier. More street-savvy. More humble. More vulgar, less refined. More fun. More, well, Tampa.

The Tampa Tribune got Tampa in a way that the Tampa Bay Times never did and never will. We understood and appreciated its power structure, its political and social conventions, its cigars and café con leche. Times top editors lived in St. Pete and wrote and behaved as if they looked down their noses at Tampa’s politics and business circles from (what Tribune Editorial Page Editor Edwin A. Roberts once famously called) “that particularly pinched Albanian village.”

For the Tribune newsroom, referring to the Times as “Brand X” or that “out-of-town newspaper” was not a case of denial of the Times’s abilities or power, it was a matter of pride that we were better positioned geographically to write Tampa Bay’s story — even if we were outspent and outgunned.

Tampa Bay is one region, but each side of the bay has its own culture, style, history and future. When the Tribune was purchased by the Times, we lost the ability to fully document the Tampa side of the story.

Wayne Garcia is associate director of USF’s School of Mass Communications. He was at the Trib from 1988-92, and at the Times from 1992-94. He was political editor of Creative Loafing from 2005-2009.

Paul Wilborn

I spent a significant chunk of my life in the newsroom of the Tampa Tribune. A bit of the 1970s, all of the 1980s, and a sliver of the 1990s. And like most of the j-school grads who arrived in that clean, well-lighted building on the Hillsborough River, I never expected to stay more than a year or so.

But God it was fun to be young and working with a bunch of misfits, oddballs and old pros at a metro paper in your hometown. Working in a time when the pay was low but the expense account was almost unlimited. And everyone who mattered read the paper.

I’m not nostalgic. But since hearing about the sudden death of the Tampa Tribune, I’m awash in memories:

• I’m a night cop reporter when an angry guy in Hyde Park takes his family hostage and starts firing at police. The newsroom is almost empty. I immediately call the Paddock Lounge, a downtown Tampa dive bar. Within minutes, I’ve located the managing editor, the metro editor, a photographer, five reporters and a copy boy. 

• I’m standing with a hundred colleagues in the newsroom — a vast beige expanse of desks and phones and computers — listening to Doyle Harvill, the feisty new publisher, tell us how we’re gonna kick those effete invaders from the St. Petersburg Times back across the bay where they belong. I applaud but wonder if I should update the resume and kick it across the bay, too.

• On the Tribune’s dime, I’m driving a rental car through the hills of Sicily heading for the tiny village of Alessandria della Rocca, the hometown of my great grandparents. 

• I’m clutching at the jump seat in an unpressurized Air Force cargo plane, looking out the window at the golden expanse of Saudi Arabia where 400,000 allied troops are gathering for war.

• I’m walking into a clutch of St. Petersburg Times reporters, who welcome me to their Tampa newsroom. I’ve officially crossed over to the other side.  

The Tribune is gone. But I’m lucky I worked in a business where on any day just about anything could happen. Where you looked at the clock and begged it to slow down. Where maybe my youth wasn’t misspent.

Paul Wilborn is executive director of The Palladium in St. Petersburg. During his time at the Trib, he had “lots of reporting and editing jobs,” the last seven years as a reporter and columnist.

Kim MacCormack

I would kill too many trees to produce the paper I would need to tell you of the love of the Tampa Tribune, its staff — especially the exceptional, hardworking and hilarious Friday Extra crew I had the privilege of leading (head cat herder would be more accurate.)

In my 37 years from copy kid to entertainment editor, I took thousands of calls from readers who wanted to praise or pee on someone or something. But I will always remember Betty from New Port Richey who just wanted to know when Touched by an Angel reruns would air. The print in the TV guide was too small to read and she never could find the cable guide on her TV. 

For months, she’d call and I would read her the synopsis. “Thank you, Miss Kim,” she’d say. When they stopped airing she wasn’t happy, but it was kismet when I received in the mail the first season on DVDs. I sent them to her. 

She sent me a snail-mail thank-you card written in grandmotherly shaky cursive. Every time the next season arrived I put them in the mail and I’d get a note or phone call. 

Then one day the package was returned and I knew Betty was gone, and I mourned a reader I’d never met.

If it weren’t for the Tribune, I never would have been touched by an angel named Betty. 

Thank you, Tampa Tribune and all the readers and colleagues who touched my heart.

Kim MacCormack was arts & entertainment editor for the Tribune. 

Elaine Silvestrini

I came to Tampa in 2003 to take a job as a courts reporter for the Tampa Tribune. The place was full of enthusiasm and love for this city and journalism, and convergence was its hallmark. We were a model for combining print, broadcast and online platforms. Groups of academics, journalists and students would tour the place on a regular basis. We joked about installing machines where the gawkers could buy food to throw at us, like they do at the zoo.

Our partnership with Channel 8 started out feeling like a shotgun wedding. Journalists on both sides of the equation were uneasy working together. With different demands and priorities, we felt the alliance was forced and illogical. While much of convergence never did work, many of us grew together and there were examples of success.

I teamed up with Lauren Mayk at Channel 8 to work on a series of stories on the tsunami tax refund fraud that overwhelmed local law enforcement when local crooks learned how to use stolen identity information to bilk millions, if not billions, from federal taxpayers. We exposed how the IRS was asleep at the switch, for a time allowing criminals to flagrantly and freely take from all of us.

Ultimately, our stories drew needed attention, contributed to a change in state law and motivated a coherent official response that appears to have helped law enforcement effectively deal with the fraud.

Lauren and I became good friends, and we often marveled that it was hard to know where her work left off and mine picked up.

And when the Tribune was sold in 2012, the end of that shotgun marriage felt like a forced divorce. We loved our Channel 8 colleagues, but they morphed into our competition.

Elaine Silvestrini was courts reporter for the Tribune from 2003-2016.

Janine Dorsey

When you work for a newspaper for nearly 25 years, you get to be a fan of that newspaper. 

Nearly every day I’d see something on our pages and on our website that I didn’t know the day before, and it was endlessly fascinating. Keith Morelli schooling me on the tegu (giant ugly lizard) problem of East Hillsborough, Christoper Spata getting comedian Patton Oswalt to fill out a faux Myspace profile, Mike Salinero’s tenacious pursuit of the “Go Hillsborough” tax initiative, Anastasia Dawson’s sensitive report of a transgender student finally going to her high school prom as the person she felt she truly was.

 Our reporters wrote stories that people cared about and learned from. Their voices were the voices of Tampa Bay. As a resident of Tampa, their voice was my voice, too.

Me? My recent gig was writing about free and cheap deals for people looking to save in various ways. It may not have been highbrow, hard-hitting investigative journalism, but I hope our readers learned something, cared about and were fans of my contribution just as much as the other stories told on our pages.

Janine Dorsey was a Tribune staffer from 1991-2016.

Kate Bradshaw

It was a weird and winding path that led me to 202 Parker Street.

Yet there I was, sitting at a boardroom table across from three Tampa Tribune editors, Ken Koehn, Jeff Scullin and Bayard Steele. 

They were hiring several reporters for a nascent Pinellas edition — Bayard beamed when he talked about the new owners’ effort to compete with the Times on its home turf — and despite my unconventional background, they gave me a shot.

First we worked out of a small room in a crusty circ warehouse off Ulmerton, then a professional but chilly office in downtown St. Pete.

I covered everything from St. Pete’s muralists to a tiger with a giant hairball to, of course, elections. The editorial board invited me to sit in on their candidate interviews, a total honor.

It was always a joy to head across the bay to the mother ship. I would chat with William March about state and local politics (and walk away utterly embarrassed at how little I knew). Bayard and I would talk about Sunset Beach, the neighborhood both of us had once called home, albeit in different decades.

But every once in a while there’d be cuts: layoffs, furloughs, pay cuts.

When offered my current position (which is kickass, mind you), I knew I’d miss the Trib. But I also had a feeling my days there would be numbered. Indeed, in my final few days, another round of layoffs was announced. This time, they were in our bureau. We were losing our office space and, more importantly, talented staff. I may have had incredible timing, but seeing my colleagues go through that again was heartbreaking. It still is. They deserve the absolute best, and if there’s any justice in this universe, they’ll get it.

Kate Bradshaw is News & Politics Editor for Creative Loafing..

This article appears in May 5-11, 2016.