Tampa Bay Times closing printing facility

[goalmouth]

Tampa Bay Times closing St. Pete printing facility. 150 jobs gone.
https://stpetecatalyst.com/tampa-bay-times-to-shut-down-sell-st-pete-printing-facility/

 

[LanceyHoward]

Tampa Bay Times closing St. Pete printing facility. 150 jobs gone.
https://stpetecatalyst.com/tampa-bay-times-to-shut-down-sell-st-pete-printing-facility/

I have never been to the Tampa area (I was going to go this winter but stayed home due to the COVID) but don't Bradenton and Sarasota have papers also. Do they continue to hang on? And the Times is going to print in Lakeland. If Lakeland has the capacity to handle the printing run then the Times circulation must have gone to heck. It sounds like they did not retain many of the Tampa Tribune subscribers.

 

[Bronco77]

I have never been to the Tampa area (I was going to go this winter but stayed home due to the COVID) but don't Bradenton and Sarasota have papers also. Do they continue to hang on?

Not sure how they're doing financially, but both papers still exist. Based on some numbers I saw the other day, Sarasota hasn't taken as much of a circulation hit as the papers in South Florida, Orlando, etc., probably because that area has a large 65-and-older demographic.

 

[Severian]

Do they continue to hang on?

Probably not. McClatchy needs to make cuts and will probably take the TBT's actions as a green light to do it themselves.

 

[LanceyHoward]

Probably not. McClatchy needs to make cuts and will probably take the TBT's actions as a green light to do it themselves.

Smaller papers that operate in the shadows of larger metropolitan or statewide dailies have particularly severe problems (even more than every other newspaper in the country) generating revenues from their website. In print papers have s subscription area that they can dominate. But websites have no boundaries and the competition will depress the revenues of the smaller paper.

Website revenues are of course becoming a larger portion of the overall revenues of a publisher. Not because website revenues are increasing but print revenues are declining. May he in the Tampa Bay area the elderly are more likely to stick to print.

 

[playthrough]

I have never been to the Tampa area (I was going to go this winter but stayed home due to the COVID) but don't Bradenton and Sarasota have papers also. Do they continue to hang on? And the Times is going to print in Lakeland. If Lakeland has the capacity to handle the printing run then the Times circulation must have gone to heck. It sounds like they did not retain many of the Tampa Tribune subscribers.

Even when the Times and the Tribune were healthy, neither could make significant inroads on the other's turf though they tried like heck. Trib readers were never going to just automatically take the Times when it was the only choice, yet Paul Tash and Co. just had to put the Trib's pelt on their wall, even as it meant taking on massive amounts of debt. So, so dumb.