Albright retires after long career as St. Pete Times retail reporter

Mark Albright, the long-time retail reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, has retired after 39 years at the paper.

Albright started working for the paper, long known as the St. Petersburg Times, in February 1973. He is a Kent State graduate.

After covering slow-moving local government and politics for 13 years, Albright shifted his attention to why we buy.

He’s covered the ever-changing business of retailing — from flea markets to Neiman Marcus — since 1986. He’s interviewed most every prominent merchant in the country. He’s profiled Wal-Mart greeters and spent days following department store buyers making their rounds in New York’s garment district.

His work is quoted in retailing textbooks. He buys his own clothes and groceries. He’s tight with a buck, but has been known to splurge. When things get slow at the office, he goes shopping.

On his last day of work, Albright was working on a story right up until walking out the door.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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Patti Bridges says:
July 8, 2012 at 7:39 pm
How WRONG can you be???!!! Mark did not begin working for the St. Petersburg Times in 1973. He began working for the Evening Independent, part of the Times Publishing Company. I don't think Mark became a Times reporter until about 1988 when the Indy folded so the Times could take their boxes and try to go head to head with the Tampa Tribune. Even today that effort to bury the Tribune is not over and is still in the workes. Mark has always been an outstanding journalist and he continued that at the St. Pete Times, now operating under a new name of the Tampa Bay Times, another change designed to get rid of the Tribune.
I thought the Times was interested in getting the story right. I think the blurb above is beneath the standards of those established by the late Nelson Poynter. If you think folks won't notice this selly, self-serving and very big ERROR, think again. I believe it is worth a CORRECTION.