Tribune executive editor Coats stepping down

Janet Coats, executive editor of the Tampa Tribune, will step down from her position Dec. 18, she announced to the newsrooms of the Tribune, WFLA-TV, News Channel 8 and TBO.com today.

Coats, 46, who joined the company in 2004 as managing editor and became executive editor in January 2005, is vice president for news for Media General's Florida Communications Group.

Coats said she made the decision primarily to spend more time with her husband, Rusty Coats, who has been based in Knoxville since he accepted a job with the E.W. Scripps Co. in 2008. Previously, he had been a product development executive in Tampa with Media General.

Since that time, Janet Coats has been commuting regularly between Tampa and Knoxville. Coats doesn't immediately have another job lined up, she said. She hopes to continue in news media in some manner, but said she doesn't expect to lead another newsroom.

Coats is leaving the company following one of the most tumultuous periods in its history, hit hard by the recession and nationwide changes in how people consume media.

In the last three years, the Florida Communications Group has announced six rounds of employee layoffs, with Coats bearing the responsibility of breaking the news to employees each time. Meanwhile, along with many other newspapers, the Tribune has had to cut pages and newspaper sections to save on newsprint costs.

By last December, rumors that the Tribune would shut down had grown so pervasive that Coats and Publisher Denise Palmer refuted the rumors in an open letter to Tribune readers.

Coats said she is able to leave now because the newspaper is on firmer ground with the recession's apparent end. Advertising has rebounded somewhat, and the newspaper has been able to hire, although questions about how to profit from the Internet are yet unresolved, she said.

"It's (the outlook) still very precarious," Coats said, "but it seems like the economic piece has stabilized."

Among her successes, Coats said the newspaper has focused more on its TBO.com Internet operations under her tenure.

Among her failures, she said she wished the newspaper had been able to do more long-form "narrative" journalism, which emphasizes story-telling. In recent years, the crisis in the industry has diverted her from pushing a narrative style, she said.

Before joining the Tribune, Coats led newsrooms including The Wichita Eagle in Kansas and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. She also briefly was the dean of faculty at The Poynter Institute, a journalism education institute in St. Petersburg. She has been a Pulitzer Prize juror five times and served for several years on the board of the American Society of News Editors.

Palmer said she and three other news executives will share Coats' duties.

Palmer credited Coats with creating a newsroom with multiple "platforms," whether newspaper, television or Internet.

"She's created a newsroom that creates news and information and distributes it in whatever form the audience would like to receive it," Palmer said.