icon caret-left icon caret-right instagram pinterest linkedin facebook twitter goodreads question-circle facebook circle twitter circle linkedin circle instagram circle goodreads circle pinterest circle

Doris writes a weekly column for LaGaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper, which has pages in English, Spanish, and Italian.  Begun in 1922 for Tampa's immigrant community, it continues to thrive more than a century later.  Her column is titled "In Context," as it aims to put contemporary issues in the context of the past.

I Didn’t Expect to Mourn

But I did. I couldn’t sleep during the night after the morning in which the letterbox contained two copies of the Times and none of the Tribune. Mystified, Hubby and I thought maybe the carriers somehow crazily confused their routes. I tried to remember if I had responded to the Tribune carrier’s annual appeal via Christmas card. Maybe I failed to send a check, and she was belatedly taking revenge?


Then a few hours later, my e-mail announced a message from Times’ publisher Paul Tash. (No, I don’t know how I got on that list.) The message cleared up the duplicative delivery question, but to me, it was akin to announcing a death in the family via Facebook. Yes, I know that you know that I’ve frequently railed against the Tribune, but it’s akin to complaining about your brother-in-law -- you don’t intend for him to die. Mother Trib was a friend of 44 years, and she merited a less abrupt announcement of her death. She still merits a proper funeral, and I hope someone will organize it. I know its many employees and former employees are having wakes, but we need one for us readers, too.


The shock was more in the method of learning about the fact than in the fact itself. We’ve known for a long time that the creeps in California who bought our town’s paper (from the reptiles in Richmond who bought it prior to that) were interested only in profit – but knowing something doesn’t necessarily make it true. And yet, my sadness struggles with my ambivalence, as I’ve wrestled for years on whether I should continue to spend money on a paper that was both excessively conservative and increasingly void of content. You may remember that a couple of years ago, I threatened here in this very column to drop my subscription if they ever dropped political reporter William March and columnist Steve Otto. They did, and I didn’t – so as I said, ambivalence.


But I have no guilt. No one cared what I did – or what you did or what anyone else did who didn’t have the moolah to buy the riverfront property on which Mother Trib lived. Her owners were not journalists dedicated to a newspaper, but instead were venture capitalists focused on property – which, I understand, they now will tear down to build apartments. Where, I wonder, are these downtown dwellers going to work? And where was the “jobs governor” during this?


What about my carrier? The return address on her Christmas cards indicates that she lives in a poor part of Tampa, and that address has remained stable for many years. Unlike her buy-and-sell bosses, she dutifully went out in the dark of night, night after night, doing her job in rain and risk and more traffic than there was the night before. I doubt if she got any reimbursement when gas prices rose, and she probably doesn’t have a retirement fund beyond Social Security.


And even after the deal, when there was no need for her nightly drives, her bosses still sent her out to deliver a duplicate newspaper and waste gas, paper, and plastic. This is planning at an executive level? Why the secrecy from readers and from workers? Nothing was going to change the done-deal, in-place sale. Two-newspaper delivery was nothing but salt in the wound, an insult added to our injury. It left us shocked and saddened, and we already were impotent.





Grief Gives Way…


I do have to say, though, that I was encouraged by Sunday’s Times. It fulfilled the promise to include former Tribune content – even my “Today in History” and Hubby’s childhood comics “Prince Valiant” and “Mark Trail”-- outdated though they are. I was even more impressed to see the garden writer who usually speaks only to us Brandonites. She is an older woman who really knows her plants, and I’m pleased to see her in the big paper. That makes me hope Ernest Hooper will be empowered to grow East Hillsborough to the level of news coverage it deserves, given that more than two-thirds of Hillsborough residents now outside of the City of Tampa.


Such localism is important, even as our globalism increases. Or perhaps especially so in an internationalist world where the nature of media makes it easy to overlook what is happening next door. Local newspapers are absolutely essential in keeping an eye on the nation’s tens of thousands of elected officials – and this simply can’t be done if only the big guys stay in business. Back in its glory days, Mother Trib kept an eye on everyone, even those of us who weren’t elected. Reporters were assigned to virtually every public board and commission, and I watched them take notes in meetings of even advisory committees to the BOCC, the EPC, the school board, etc.


Most were good, but occasionally there was a biased or lazy one. When I was a trustee at HCC, I called a Tribune editor to tell him that the reporter whose name was on a story had not attended the meeting and that her “report” probably originated from the president’s office. This truth telling was possible because Tribune staff interacted with the community enough that I knew which editor to call, and he knew me to be trustworthy. Such coverage takes a big staff -- and giving them the freedom to ask questions and rock boats.


This will not be as likely in the future because, willingly or not, we are joining a monopoly. It may be a good monopoly, with a history of Pulitzer Prize winners, but any monopoly is dangerous and especially so when the monopoly determines what the public knows about its democracy. It becomes vital to support the little guys, historic papers such as the Florida Sentinel-Bulletin and La Gaceta, as well as radio news reporters such as WMNF and WEDU. These are Davids up against Goliath, and we must keep the few Davids we have. LaGaceta is an especially cheap investment in democracy. Tell your friends to subscribe. They can pay for it with their former Tribune dollars and have lots of change leftover.



Historians Have the Last Word


I can’t end without thinking about Leland Hawes, a sweet and thoughtful gentleman who was the very soul of Mother Trib. Leland was a newsman all his life, having delivered a handwritten newspaper to his Thonotosassa neighbors when he was a boy. The knowledge of Tampa history that he carried in his head was absolutely encyclopedic. Neither I nor any of my historian friends ever asked him a question that went unanswered. If he didn’t know off the top of his head, he would get back to you a few days later with the results of his research. His office in the old Trib building was the perfect picture of chaos: with books and papers on every surface, it was hard to find a place to sit – but he not only knew exactly where everything was, he knew what it said and who said it.


I had a question the other day that I would have asked Leland, but there’s no phone service beneath his tombstone at Oaklawn. Dr. Gary Mormino knows that he is second-place to the sainted Leland, but Gary is alive, so I sent my query to him. It turned out that he is in Spain – and yes, the internet is wonderful! He and his wife, Lynne, are in Valencia, the hometown of our Vicente Martinez-Ybor. Gary wrote: “We were about to board our flight when we got a call asking me about the Tribune sale. Leland Hawes is rolling in his grave. How sad to see what was once a great paper fall.”


Mother Trib was great, and Leland was a large part of that – both as a young reporter and later as a sagacious chronicler. The Tribune far exceeded the Times in its coverage of history, and I am grateful for its long support of Leland’s work and for my file cases full of his writing. I just wish the millions of pages that the Tribune printed in its 122-year history were digitized to make it easier to find things. A grant, anyone? A Poynter Institute project? USF Mass Comm or maybe the USF library? We need to do this.


My thanks also to the Trib’s management for the centennial book that it published on its 100th anniversary in 1995 -- and for the coffee mug I still have from that occasion. I could put something stronger in it, and you could join me for a mournful drink. On the other hand, there’s this: Gary’s e-mail came on May 5, and on the 8th, there he was in the Sunday Times, writing about sports and World War II. Maybe there’s hope. Some work of noble note may yet be done.



doris@dweatherford.com





Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.
Make a comment to the author