The New York Times takes a look at SPT’s model: DURING the next year or so, The St. Petersburg Times plans to continue pursuing deeply reported, long-term features about such topics as Florida’s property insurance crisis, complex tax issues, public education at all levels, and wildlife and endangered species. It will balance this slate of stories against all the other bread-and-butter issues it covers everyday for its readers: politics, business, sports, community affairs, culture and more. “We’re going to invest the time and energy and the resources in these stories because the question we’re always asking ourselves is what matters to our audience,” said Stephen Buckley, the managing editor of the newspaper. “And that’s the question that really drives our organization: Are we doing work that matters?” Such ambitions were rare enough in the good old days of gumshoe journalism, when newspapers were cash machines. Now, as more readers and advertisers migrate to the Internet, this kind of enterprise reporting has become harder to find at many papers. And in that context, The St. Petersburg Times is itself an endangered species — an independent, privately owned daily that continues to serve up quality journalism. Many owners of other daily city papers sold them off years ago to try to avoid inheritance taxes. But The St. Petersburg Times was not sold; to guarantee local ownership and independence, its owner, Nelson Poynter, gave it away upon his death in 1978 to a nonprofit educational organization now called the Poynter Institute.
“We’re going to invest the time and energy and the resources in these stories because the question we’re always asking ourselves is what matters to our audience,” said Stephen Buckley, the managing editor of the newspaper. “And that’s the question that really drives our organization: Are we doing work that matters?”
Such ambitions were rare enough in the good old days of gumshoe journalism, when newspapers were cash machines. Now, as more readers and advertisers migrate to the Internet, this kind of enterprise reporting has become harder to find at many papers. And in that context, The St. Petersburg Times is itself an endangered species — an independent, privately owned daily that continues to serve up quality journalism. Many owners of other daily city papers sold them off years ago to try to avoid inheritance taxes. But The St. Petersburg Times was not sold; to guarantee local ownership and independence, its owner, Nelson Poynter, gave it away upon his death in 1978 to a nonprofit educational organization now called the Poynter Institute.
Best line: “We don’t put out a newspaper to make money,” says Paul C. Tash, the chief executive of the Times Publishing Company, which oversees the paper. “We make money so we can put out a great newspaper.”
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