Goodbye St. Pete, Hello Tampa Bay

What’s in a name? Maybe the fortunes of a newspaper and the region it represents.

At midnight Tuesday, the St. Petersburg Times announced it will become the Tampa Bay Times to ring in the new year, 2012.

The column attributed to CEO Paul Tash offers a lengthy defense of the change. As Tash explains it, the new name was needed because most readers of the paper reside outside of the St. Petersburg area. While acknowledging the significance of messing with a respected brand that has been established for over 110 years, Tash offers a few justifications, among them the common denominator of “Tampa Bay” among the area’s professional sports teams, “Tampa Bay” as the listed destination for flights to Tampa International Airport, and the newspaper’s history of philanthropy throughout the region.

He even provides a cute, nostalgic anecdote about Orlando ridiculing St. Pete while competing with the area for a Major League Baseball team over 20 years ago.

My initial thought was that money is the driving force  behind the change, and perhaps it is. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this is about nothing more than getting more eyeballs in order to move businesses to spend their advertising dollars with the Times (assuming enough is out there to be made in this economically distressed period we’re suffering through).  Tash noted the St. Petersburg Times is already the region’s most-read newspaper, so I’m not sure swapping out a name will have that much of an impact in the short term.  Most likely the upper brass isn’t expecting it to, and this could be just part of a larger overhaul of the paper’s infrastructure. As recently as this month, the Times has been dealing with its financial hardships through layoffs and furloughs.

It was another passage, however, that got me to thinking the Times could be trying to change more than just its fortunes by swapping “St. Pete” for “Tampa Bay”:

But like other citizens and civic leaders, we recognize that all our communities have a stronger future as part of a dynamic Tampa Bay region, rather than a constellation of towns and cities jockeying for advantage against each other.

This sure sounds like Tash editorializing about the alleged rivalry between Pinellas and Hillsborough (not without significance regarding the paper’s financial interests). While I’m not convinced that dynamism and competition among municipalities are at odds with one another, the point Tash is making about the benefits of cooperation comes through. Personally, I’m looking forward to the Tampa Bay Times, and to see whether something as simple as a name change could be the catalyst to something far more important — an area’s revival and growth as it alters its self-perception.

What’s in a name? We’ll see.

Bring on the unpaid contributors

UPDATE at the bottom

UPDATE II (June 8, 2009) — enabling the entrepreneurial journalist

Jeffrey Seglin, a professor who has written for the New York Times, makes the case that when writers write for free, they not only devalue their own work, they make it harder for others to receive compensation:

Your work has value. If you start giving it away for free, then it diminishes that value and makes it harder for others to charge for their work as well.

I think this is true. One need only spend a few moments perusing freelance writing job sites or surveying the payments correspondents are receiving from local pubs (online and print) to know just how little contributors are compensated.

Now, do I think it’s wrong for writers to contribute their work for free?

No.

But do I agree that anyone other than a new writer looking to build a portfolio is — to use Seglin’s term — a “blockhead” if he or she writes for free?

Why the Boston Globe needs to go bankrupt

At BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis says the New York Times should force the Boston Globe into bankruptcy:

[The Globe is] losing $85 million a year. They saved only $20 with recent concessions. It could bring The New York Times down. Time for radical surgery.

Speaking of bankruptcy (and layoffs, and pay cuts and out-of-print): The Wall Street Journal maps the decline of the nation’s top newspapers since 2006.

Laid-off journalists have a home

For the unemployed journalist thrown out on his or her keester, Jim Gold, a former senior editor for the Arizona Republic, and his wife Sue have created Jilted Journalists.

It’s nothing much to look at design-wise, and the content is rather thin so far. But it has a cheeky tone, and at least endeavors to offer some helpful advice for those recently reacquainted with the ranks of the unemployed. A couple of highlights:

The middle-class unemployment blues

Laid off in 2007. Relying on an early pension, unemployment benefits and occasional substitute teaching gigs to get by. Followed by a loss of  benefits for a month because of an oversight by the county. Former Minnesota Star Tribune employee Delma J. Francis thought she would finally qualify for food stamps. She was wrong:

With that change in my circumstances, I went back to the county, sure that I would now qualify for EBT, formerly known as food stamps, or medical assistance. (Being on the far side of 40 with no health insurance is not a comfortable place to be.) But no. The $508 a month in early pension and what I had earned substitute teaching the previous pay period rendered me still ineligible for help.

“Wait a minute,” I said to the county worker. “Let me get this straight. Because I’m working when I can, trying to help myself — and by doing so, paying taxes to help all those people out in the waiting room feed their kids and keep themselves healthy — I can’t get any help?”

She just stared at me without an ounce of remorse for the news she’d just delivered.

Layoffs played for laughs and pathos

Slate has a cute compilation of movie scenes of people being laid off (or fired or let go or canned; choose your euphemism). Depending on your current job status (or capacity for empathy) you may find this depressing, amusing or possibly cathartic. I enjoyed touches of all three!

There's laid off, and then there's axed

While going through a divorce, and  recovering from painful surgery, Laura Meade Kirk was let go by the Providence Journal, where she’d worked for 23 years. Let’s just say the timing wasn’t all that great:

I then hobbled to HR to listen to the company spiel about the layoffs. Blah, blah, blah. “Do you have any questions?” I was asked.
“No,” I replied. But holding out my arms, with the IV lines hanging, I did say: “Your timing sucks.”

I then signed the requisite forms and crutched off to the elevator, fighting back tears. I wasn’t going to let them see me cry. I punched at the buttons, but the elevator never came.
Of course not. Just my luck.
So I crawled down the stairs, on my hands and knees, careful to make sure my crutches didn’t catch the IV lines and rip them from my heart.

Kirk’s story ends up having a happy ending, perhaps validating the old adage, “It’s darkest just before the dawn.” But what a way to get there.

Chicago Tribune writer covers recession, joins it

Lou Carlozo was covering the recession for the Chicago Tribune. Then he got laid off.

Writing for True/Slant, Carlozo expresses his discontent at being forced by Trib management to write for a blog — “The Recession Diaries” — that, in his words, “involved me telling very tough stories about my own family finances–stories that led me and my wife to squabble many times over which details to withhold, which to print, and which ones looked inappropriate in print after the fact.”

Then, to add insult to the injury of being laid off, the Trib censored Carlozo’s attempt to let his readers know he was joining the ranks of the unemployed:

I wanted to post a final blog Wednesday to readers explaining that I had lost my job, a victim of the very recession I covered. I posted this without management’s approval. I then informed management. Management took it down.

Oh, by the way: On the same day that Carlozo and over 50 newsroom staffers who were laid off by the Tribune, the company petitioned bankruptcy court to dole out $13.3 million in bonuses to over 700 workers.

Former Seattle P-I journalists start nonprofit website

Former reporters for the now-defunct Seattle Post-Intelligencer (the print edition; there is a SeattlePI.com) have started the nonprofit Seattle Post Globe. Here’s a statement from publisher Kery Murakami on the new venture:

We’ll begin by bringing the work of former P-I journalists to our site. We’re planning next to work with public television, and possibly public radio journalists, on stories and special projects, combining the best of our approaches.

Ultimately, we’re exploring creating a combined news organization based on the idea that distributing information should be not just for profit.

Always look on the bright side of layoffs

From the “sensitivity during hard times” file, this Virginian-Pilot headline: Pilot to lay off 40, but executives say outlook is brighter.

As the opening graf of Philip Walzer’s article attests, the layoffs “will be the third wave of job cuts at The Pilot in the past six months.”

Nevertheless, The Pilot’s financial outlook is brightening, said Maurice Jones, the president and publisher.

Combined, the newspaper and its associated companies turned a profit in the first quarter of the year, said Jones, who declined to disclose figures. March was The Pilot’s most robust month in at least a year, he said, with every unit recording a profit.

But the profits, Jones said, still fall short of the company’s targets, required to pay taxes and other bills and equipment costs, including the modernization of its printing press. That, he said, triggered the latest cutbacks.