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Newspaper cuts felt in community

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By STEVE OTTO

sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: May 29, 2009

I once worked at an afternoon paper, The Tampa Times.

It was a good, honest paper. It was not as big as Mother Trib, the morning paper, but it was feisty and full of good writing and stories dug out by reporters who asked tough questions.

The Times, unfortunately, was a victim of changing times. People would come home and instead of picking up the afternoon paper, they would turn on the tube or do something else. It wasn't that the paper slipped. The Times, like most afternoon papers, never stopped doing its job. Many of its stories focused on the "why" of things, after the Trib reported the "who, what, where and when."

The world continued to get more complicated and I thought we were a lesser community when the Times finally gave up the ghost and disappeared on an August afternoon in 1982. Some of those who left stayed in journalism, but just as many moved into completely different lines of work.

For readers across the Tampa Bay area, there was still good news. Mother Trib, with its blue-collar, aggressive style, competed everywhere with the St. Pete Times. Both papers offered unique styles and enough competition to give readers confidence that not too many stories were going to go untold.

Technology gradually brought changes. I say gradually, but we moved steadily from portable typewriters to electrics to the early word processors. It seemed like every week a new piece of technology changed the way we operated.

The coming of the Internet changed things again, although for those of us in the newsroom, it was just another tool to gather news and information.

Falling in love

You know, it's easy to fall in love with technology and gadgets. I remember growing up and the promises of how technology was going to make our lives almost effortless, leaving us time to pursue more noble pursuits, whatever they were supposed to be.

Who would have guessed all of those gadgets would have meant our brave new world would be one of multitasking jobs that used to be done by five or six people now done by one overworked person.

But that's progress, and the advent of online news and blogs and now social networks like Facebook and Twitter swallow up enormous amounts of energy and resources.

Falling out

Combined with declining advertising revenue and a deepening recession, these have been rough times for newspapers. Mother Trib, like others across the country, has been forced to make deep cuts.

I've lost friends and colleagues - people with enormous talent and ability. They have had to leave a craft they loved and worked long hours for, to help create those daily miracles that are a newspaper.

But the loss is not just those of us in the newsroom. The greater loss is to a community that relied on newspapers to act as watchdogs and monitors of our daily lives.

I see a generation that doesn't have a grasp of local institutions that are the fabric of our society. We're in a transition time that is transferring some of those processes to electronics but we aren't there yet. In our complicated and changing world, if we don't take time to read and understand what is happening, we will pay a great price.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, for more of Steve Otto's musings.

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