More Tampa Tribune reflections from business journalists

The following business journalists offered these comments to Talking Biz News after news this week that the Tampa Tribune, one of their former employers, was being acquired and closed by rival The Tampa Bay Times.

J. Jennings Moss, editor of the New York Business Journal:

The paper was my first job out of college. I covered cops and courts out of the New Port Richey bureau for the Pasco County edition. Then, my byline was Joshua J. Moss (I didn’t change it J. Jennings Moss until I went to DC).

I was there only a year, but I could argue it was the most important year of my reporting career. The lessons I learned, the stories I covered, still stick with me nearly 30 years later. My biggest takeaways: — The power of local: the Tribune had a policy of making its reports live in the communities they covered. I wasn’t a fan of that as I wanted to actually live in Tampa or St. Pete, but I quickly came to understand the logic. If bad stuff was happening in my coverage zone, it was happening in my community.

— The justification for covering tragedy: Reporters get knocked for showing up on someone’s door after they’ve just lost a loved one, but it serves a purpose, both for the paper and for the subject. I learned so much about people and about myself by asking these questions. I realized the importance of being there as someone shared the life story of their now deceased family member. It was powerful stuff and I remember those stories.

— The fun of a newspaper war: I loved that the Tribune was in competition with the St. Pete Times (to me, it will always be the St. Pete Times). In the beat I had, the reporter for the Times who had the same beat won the Pulitzer the year before for uncovering corruption in the Pasco County Sheriff’s Department. I won some scoops, lost some stories, and learned all about hustle.

— The leadership: From my immediate editors Archie Blount and CT Bowen, to the line editing talents of William March, to managing editor Carl Crothers, to editor in chief Doyle Harvill (who personally made sure I knew the difference between “its” and “it’s”), I’m grateful to have learned under them. I was only at the Tribune a year (from November 1987-November 1988), leaving because my mother was terminally ill. But I will also remember it.

Forget Paris. I will always have Pasco.

Kim Kleman, editor in chief of American Lawyer:

My first boss, Tribune state editor Bill Handy, gave me a piece of advice that sticks with me today. “Your job is to get great stories in the newspaper,” I remember him saying. Duh, I thought. Then he explained that twofold assignment: If I wrote amazing articles but couldn’t send them in on time, I failed. And if I made deadline but produced only so-so stories, I also failed. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made that point to my students and staffers.

At lunch one day, reporters Dan McLaughlin, Jeff Mangum and I created a challenge: Each of us would close our eyes, pick a random word from the dictionary and use that word in the lede of a story. Whoever got theirs through the copy desk into publication won a beer from the others. I don’t know whether Dan and Jeff ended up picking a word and I don’t remember my victory beer, but I do know I’m responsible for the only Tribune lede that contained the word “Abbevillian.”

Greg Lamm, Seattle-based freelancer and former Puget Sound Business Journal banking reporter:

I covered a variety of beats for the local news desk, including the environment and crime, for the newspaper’s suburban reporting staff. It was the heyday of the great Battle Across the Bay, when the Tribune and St. Pete Times both opened a slew of bureaus and beefed up their news and advertising staffs to compete on “enemy” turf in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, where the red Trib newspaper boxes and the green Times boxes lined the roadsides.

The Trib seemed to always be the underdog to the Times. I remember the higer-up editors at the Tribune referred to the times as “Brand-X.” Some Times reporters tried to get sources to exclusively release info to them, and there were a few stories about how press releases would disappear or be buried on the bottom of the reporter reading baskets at the cop shop. But, despite it all, the competition among reporters at the two newspapers was mostly good-natured. Sure, you loved to beat them, and often the goal on breaking stores was to out-report them with details and to publish better-written stores. Sometimes we did. My overall take was that the Times was better at longer-form and in-depth stores, while the Trib was scrappier and better at responding to breaking news.

Fun times, the likes of which we are unlikely to see again in the news business. That makes me sad.

John Koppisch, senior editor at Forbes:

I was there for four years – ’85-’89. Worked alongside Kim Kleman for the first six months and we’re still good friends. Worked as a business reporter in the Lakeland buro and then as buro chief for Citrus County before Jim Kennedy brought me downtown for the main business staff. It was a great time because both papers were invading each others’ turf and throwing all kinds of money into the war. The business section sent me to Europe twice for two-week-long reporting trips for some quite marginal stories. No expense account I’ve put in since then has topped those European tabs. We peaked at some 400 editorial staffers by the time I left to work overseas — today that would be one of the biggest newsrooms in the country.

Other Trib alums I keep up with are Andrea Peyser, now at the NY Post, and Jeff Mangum and Debbie Porterfield, cityside reporters who had come over from the old Tampa Times. And of course my wife, Maureen Sullivan, worked there as a daily local columnist. We always thought we were a much better paper than the St. Pete Times. We were tougher and grittier and more dogged. We also had a much bigger staff, including a far bigger sports section and a separate and much bigger daily business section. But St. Pete had the shinier graphics and —dominating a pretty sleepy county, Pinellas — it could afford to really focus on winning prizes. Plus its very liberal editorial page endeared it to the journalism fraternity. Our edit page was run by an ex-Dow Jones guy who produced a very smart, Wall Street Journal-style page – and got a lot of abuse from local journos for it.

Anyway, that’s my take. That was five publications ago for me but I still have fond memories.