5 reasons you should not feel bad about Tampa Bay Times layoffs

This has been a difficult week for the Tampa Bay Times.

Last Monday, the newspaper was shut out of the Pulitzer Prizes. The recipient of 12 previous Pulitzers, the Times newsroom measures itself, in part, by winning these awards. So it’s never a good day when the champagne isn’t flowing at 3 p.m. on Pulitzer Monday as the winners are announced.

Two days later, the Times suffered a slight of a lesser degree, but one that speaks to its current standing.

When asked during a televised debate what was the first thing they read in the morning, not one of the four Democrats running for Florida governor mentioned the Times, the state’s largest newspaper. If the Times has lost Gwen Graham—of THAT Graham family—that says something.

But the worst news of all, which the Times attempted to bury by announcing the promotion of two editors, came via the Tampa Bay Business Journal. It reported Times Publishing is laying off 50 employees. To wit:

Paul Tash, the newspaper’s chairman and CEO, had warned of the potential for job cuts in a March 23 column, writing that the new tariffs could add more than $3 million to the Times’ newsprint bill.

Times spokeswoman Sherri Day confirmed the layoffs in an email Wednesday and said they are a direct response to the tariffs.

Day declined to specify how many of those layoffs would affect the newsroom, saying only that the “cuts are taking place throughout the organization.” She also declined to disclose the Times’ total number of employees.

While it is natural to sympathize with the individuals who are given the proverbial pink slip (such as movie critic Steve Persall), here are five reasons to NOT feel bad about these layoffs.

1. While Tash is directly linking these job cuts to the tariffs recently imposed by the Donald Trump administration, it’s important to remember this: The Times’ dire financial situation is really a result of the newspaper’s disastrous decision to acquire the naming rights of the Tampa arena originally opened as the Ice Palace.

It was estimated to cost the newspaper $2.5 million a year to have its name on the hockey arena. That total amount—roughly $30 million—is about the same amount of money it borrowed from Boston-based Crystal Financial LLC.

Crystal Financial is a lender that specializes “in making loans to companies who require more debt capital than is currently made available from traditional lenders,” according to its website.

If the Times didn’t waste its money on that naming rights deal, would it have had to take out that loan from Crystal Financial? Would it have had to make secret deals with local leaders for a second round of financing to pay off the Crystal Finance loans? Almost certainly not.

The Times’ financial issues are unique to the Times. They are not just the decline-of-newspapers financial issues that so many other news organizations have and are enduring.

Undoubtedly the Times was impacted by the Great Recession. And undoubtedly it is being hurt by the tariffs. But it would have been in a far better financial position if the Times’ business leaders had not cut a check each year to a hockey team owner from whom it would later receive a secret loan in order to stay afloat.

It all goes back to that naming rights deal. And the business executive who made the final decision—Tash—has never been held accountable for it.

2. The name change. I know, I know, I’ll never forgive the Times for changing its name from the St. Petersburg Times to the Tampa Bay Times. But the part of that criticism which applies here is that when the Times did make that decision—probably the right decision—it decided to focus more on Hernando and Pasco counties, thinking the expanding real estate markets there would lead to expanded ad revenue.

This turned out to be a bad business decision that, again, put the Times in risky financial shape regardless of the issues it now faces with the tariffs. The Times decided to focus more on Hernando and Pasco at the expense of its coverage of St. Pete and Tampa, just as these two cities were booming.

Given the declining size of the newsroom, this was a zero-sum decision. For every reporter the Times allocated to BFE, it had one less in downtown St. Pete and south Tampa, two markets which have shown no signs of slowing down.

3. Aren’t these layoffs just karma over how the Times bought the Tampa Tribune and shut it down?

Five months after the Times purchased the Trib, it brought its staffing levels back to where they were in 2015. The Times borrowed an additional $13.3 million from Crystal Financial to buy and fold the Tribune.

In other words, the Times took out millions more in debt from its Boston-based loan shark, err, creditor to put its competitor out of business.

And although it had promised lifelines to many ex-Tribune staffers, the Times actually ended up with less staff than it had before the deal (mostly because the Tribune’s ad revenues were tanking faster than the Times realized when it purchased it).

4. The Times is rarely up-front about its finances. Yes, Tash warned that there was the potential for job cuts because of the tariffs, but why is the news about the layoffs in the Business Journal and not the Times itself? (How many Times readers even read the TBBJ?)

Why didn’t the Times give 25-year-veteran Persall a proper send-off and explain it is likely the newspaper will move forward without a film critic. (Disclosure: Tash did speak to Poynter.org, which is likely read by about 1 percent of Times readers).

A better question: Why doesn’t the Times hold itself to the same levels of transparency it expects from other community institutions? This is, after all, a newspaper which made a secret financing deal with community leaders in order to pay off those high-interest loans it had received from Crystal Financial.

The identities of some of those leaders would not have been known were it not for this website and LaGaceta’s Patrick Manteiga. In fact, some of the lenders’ identities are still not known.

The Times’ hypocrisy on the issue of transparency may be the No. 1 reason its readers and the community-at-large should not feel sorry for the newspaper.

5. The Times’ digital product remains a dog’s breakfast.

Knowing full well that ‘print is dying,’ the Times continues to produce a subpar digital product. Prima facie evidence is its mobile offering, which for months was plagued by ad popups saying the reader had won a gift card. Once the popup appeared, the Times website was inaccessible.

The Times acknowledged the problem and said, the “issue is being addressed at the highest levels.” But, by that time, the popup issue had been a problem for months.

Deputy Managing Editor Ron Brackett offered a considerate explanation about why the pop-ups were happening. The paper sells its unused ad space to ad serving companies; sometimes “bad actors slip through cracks in the networks and add malicious code,” Brackett explained. (I was engaged in a running conversation about the issue on Brackett’s Facebook page, so I know he was frustrated by the Kafkaesque problem.)

Still, if the issue originated from selling unused space to ad servers, the Times should have stopped that practice until the problem was fixed. Nothing else should have mattered other than readers being able to access the site.

Beyond that problem, the Times, like so many other newspaper websites, are still trying to put a square peg into a round hole. They are reporting for print first and then jamming that content onto its website.

City Lab last week asked “Why Are Local Newspaper Sites So Horrible?” — as if the writer had the Times’ website in mind when he wrote his column.

The torments of these sites are well known: Clunky navigation, slow page-loading, browser-freezing autoplaying videos, a siege of annoying pop-up ads, and especially those grids of bottom-of-the-page “related content” ads hawking belly fat cures and fake headlines, what’s known as Internet chum.

Go right now and look at the Times’ website and determine for yourself if this assessment doesn’t apply. This is the Times “front page” from Monday morning (yes, with a review of a Saturday night concert as one of its four lead stories). What is inviting about any part of it?

Oh, and the Times is still one of the very few Top 25 newspaper websites to engage in mugshot journalism, but that’s for another day.

This is not about making fun of the Times’ design work. It’s about wondering why, if it knows that the cost of printing its product is becoming prohibitive, is it not investing more resources into a better digital product?

One final note about why no one should feel sorry for the Times. Simply put, it has lost its way editorially.

It has made some bizarre candidate endorsements, such as its endorsement of Philip Garett over incumbent Steve Kornell in the 2015 St. Pete City Council District 6 race.

No endorsement was more controversial, however, than the newspaper’s siding with Rick Baker over incumbent Rick Kriseman in last year’s mayoral race. Given Kriseman’s progressive bona fides, that decision not only shocked many readers, it left them confused.

After the Times purchased the Tribune, the paper announced that it would expand its editorial pages, and include more right-of-center voices. Tash said one of his priorities for this year is to “continue to connect, or reconnect, with the good people who voted for Donald Trump.”

Given how Tash blames his newspaper’s financial woes on the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, I wonder if he has the same fondness for those “good people.”