{"id":41561,"date":"2024-02-01T11:04:17","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T16:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/?p=41561"},"modified":"2024-02-01T11:04:24","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T16:04:24","slug":"tampa-bay-times-closes-downtown-tampa-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/2024\/02\/01\/tampa-bay-times-closes-downtown-tampa-office\/","title":{"rendered":"Tampa Bay Times closes downtown Tampa office"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Tampa Bay Times building in Tampa, Florida on Jan. 8, 2022.Thirty-two years after opening, the Tampa Bay Times\u2019 downtown Tampa office has closed its doors.

The bureau, which opened in 1992 on Ashley Drive near I-275, shut down with no fanfare in the first week of January, effectively closing the door on a generation\u2019s worth of memories including multiple Pulitzer celebrations.

In a statement to Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, Time chairman and CEO Conan Gallaty said his team\u2014which includes nearly 100 journalists\u2014has embraced hybrid work and that it simply doesn\u2019t need all that office space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


\u201cWe still cover Hillsborough County vigorously and have decided on a different office space in Tampa that better suits our needs,\u201d Gallaty, who is supposed to publish a column on the matter, added.

Sherri Day, Communications Director for the Times also told CL that the \u201cTampa Bay Times\u201d signage atop the 10-story building <\/a>, will come down.

The Times\u2019 new office is technically out of Tampa city limits at 5505 Johns Rd. Suite 710 in the Town \u2018n\u2019 Country area. Day, who also serves on the paper\u2019s editorial board, told CL that there are about 20 workstations at the outpost.

The paper\u2019s St. Petersburg office is still at 490 First Ave. S, but it too isn\u2019t nearly as bustling as it was pre-pandemic. \u201cWe embrace hybrid work everywhere so none of our offices are as busy as they used to be,\u201d Day added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The Times\u2019 downtown Tampa office is where staffers used to overlook the city, sometimes even watching parts of it, like backyard sheds and even Ybor City itself in 2020, burn.

The office was also a mile from the final offices of the Tampa Tribune, a Pulitzer-winning publisher that\u2019d been publishing daily for 121 years before the Times purchased it in 2016. Approximately 265 Trib-ers lost their jobs after the purchase led by since-retired CEO and chairman Paul Tash <\/a>, who closed the Tribune so quickly that its staffers didn\u2019t even get to release a farewell edition.

The closure comes at a time of relative calm for the Bay area’s vaunted paper of record, which has not reported any layoffs since February 2023<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

(past layoffs happened in 2020, 2019, and twice in 2018).

It\u2019s not been smooth sailing for the news industry, however, and the Times is not exempt.

In 2021, it closed its printing plant <\/a>, sold the land underneath it to vulturistic hedge fund Alden, and slashed 150 jobs related to the plant’s operation. The move meant the Times’ printing moved to the same location as local Gannett-owned papers, as well as, Orlando Sentinel, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, which still keeps a tiny office a few blocks from the Times’ now-former downtown Tampa HQ. And of course, the Times ended daily printing back in 2020 in favor of a twice-weekly schedule that is still in effect today.

Last year, its longtime Tampa City Hall reporter<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlie Frago abruptly left the paper over philosophical differences <\/a>. \u201cI did not see a path forward,” Frago told CL at the time.

In 2022, the feds refiled a $2.8 million lien <\/a>against the Times Publishing Company, after first announcing plans to take over the paper\u2019s pension plans in late-2021 <\/a>. Liens against the company were north of $103 million in 2019<\/a>.

In 2018, a trust controlled by the widow of Nelson Poynter\u2014whose institute owns the Times\u2014sued the Times publishing company, saying it owed her nearly $7.8 million after defaulting on a promissory note<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

.

In 2017, the Times was bailed out by an investment group\u2014FBN Partners\u2014that loaned the paper $12 million. The group included Tash, Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik, Tampa business heavyweights Frank and Carol Morsani, developer Ted Couch, investment company chair and former part owner of the Washington Commanders football team, Robert Rothman, plus Tampa entrepreneur and philanthropist Kiran Patel and his wife, Pallavi. Another investor in the group\u2014which added $3 million to its loan in 2019\u2014is Tampa developer and former Blue Pearl Veterinary Clinic CEO Darryl Shaw.

One investor remains unnamed, but in 2021 Day told CL that the FBN loan had been paid in full<\/a>.

This is a developing post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Tampa Bay Times building in Tampa, Florida on Jan. 8, 2022.Thirty-two years after opening, the Tampa Bay Times\u2019 downtown Tampa office has closed its doors. The bureau, which opened… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41562,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","default_image_id":71799,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[17],"tags":[7433],"class_list":["post-41561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-regional-and-world-news","tag-tampa-bay-times-closes-downtown-tampa-office"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}