The Tampa Bay Times is eliminating 60 jobs this month, 20% of its staff, citing revenue shortfalls compared to its 2024 business plan and limited prospects of improvement for the balance of the year.
The main revenue culprit has been less-than-expected print advertising revenue, CEO and president Conan Gallaty said in an interview. That income is still a major and profitable element in the newspaper’s finances, despite the Times publishing in print only on Wednesdays and Sundays.
The digital side of the operation continues to grow at a 20% annual rate, Gallaty added, but that does not make up the difference for the print declines.
The Times is offering a buyout package with an extra four weeks of severance pay to those who voluntarily choose to leave. Then the company will make additional layoffs, if necessary, to meet its target reduction by Aug. 31. Gallaty would not comment on how many of the cuts, if any, would be in the newsroom. That depends, in part, on who takes the buyouts, he said.
In a letter to employees Tuesday, Gallaty also said that there will be “product changes … implemented over the rest of this year because we cannot produce the same volume of work with fewer people.”
He declined in an interview to be more specific about what product changes are being considered. Besides the newspaper and its site, the Times’ parent company publishes a number of specialty publications, including a weekly handout entertainment guide, a monthly luxury magazine and an annual promotion piece for the area’s tourist development council. Some of those could be targets for cutbacks or elimination.
Gallaty joined the Times in 2018 as chief digital officer. He became CEO and president in July 2022, the first to lead the company since Nelson Poynter’s death in 1978 to come from a business rather than a news background.
Earlier the Times had taken the drastic step of cutting print from seven to two days a week, one of the first newspapers in the nation to do so. It later closed its printing plant, sold the land beneath it and outsourced printing to a Gannett facility in Lakeland.
Despite the drive to digital transformation he has led, Gallaty told me that digital still accounts for only 26% of revenue at the Times. I suggested that was low for the industry, where chains like Gannett and Lee and many others are near or just over 50-50.
He agreed, but quickly observed, “There are different ways to do that, as you know” — alluding to the aggressive cuts in many places of news resources, resulting in tolerance for a softer and less local news report.
The Times is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, a school for working journalists and a center for fact-checking and work on journalism ethics. In practice, the two are operated by interlocking boards including the top executives of both.
Their business fortunes, however, have diverged dramatically in recent years. Poynter, though smaller, is growing revenue and staff. It had experienced its own financial crisis in the early 2000s but has rallied since. A key move was transferring PolitiFact in 2018 from the Times to Poynter, facilitating foundation support.
The Times bought and folded its longtime competitor, the Tampa Tribune, in 2016. The costs of the purchase and integrating operations were high, and in the years that followed print circulation and advertising hit hard times, as they did industrywide. The company needed to borrow heavily and transferred control of its failing pension plan to the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation in 2021.
Over the last several years, the company improved its capital situation and “is in good standing with its lenders,” Gallaty said.
Poynter is unaffected by the reverses in the Times’ revenue. Neither party supports the other with a transfer of funds.
The unusual ownership arrangement, despite all those changes, continues to be a plus, Gallaty said. “We can remain committed to the cause of local journalism. Being independently and locally owned by Poynter is one of the keys to that.”
