Media

Want to get to know the Tampa Bay area quickly?

Other than reading this, of course, one of the best ways is to read a local newspaper. Or turn on the radio and hit the scan button. Listen a minute or two to each station, and you’ll see that our musical and talk show tastes run the gamut.

Reading a variety of papers, and listening to and watching a variety of stations, gives us additional eyes with which to see our community. Otherwise, we’re a bit like the proverbial six blind men each touching a different part of an elephant and each thinking he had hold of a snake (trunk), a cloak (ear), or a tree (leg)!

In this chapter we’ll give you a heads-up on the various magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television stations originating here. Then there are the weekly newspapers, the alternative newspapers, and the magazines published here—the list goes on. Suffice it to say, we’re not hurting for news or the means to tell it.

Our Pulitzer Prize–winning daily papers, the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times, as well as many of our weekly papers, stay on top of what’s going on in the world as well as at City Hall, in county commission meetings, and in the state legislature. They give us insight into the sports played here, and they help fill our calendars with festivals and other activities.

Pay attention to the ads, too—even if “50% Off Boat Trailer Hitches” aren’t on your need-to-buy list at the moment. Ads tell us more about the local economy—there’s water nearby and people can afford boats—in a minute than we sometimes think.

The history of this region would be vastly different without first its newspapers and later its radio and television stations. Without the St. Petersburg Times’ “Negro News Page,” begun in 1939—we’ve forgotten what a bold statement that was back then—the path to integration in this area may have been harder than it was.

Without an AM news-talk radio show, ordering products online might still be a far-off fantasy—but that’s how Home Shopping Network got started (see Shopping chapter).

Maybe most important of all, newspapers introduce us to each other. We cheer for the USF jazz professor who wins a Guggenheim Fellowship. We pray the young babysitters-to-be at an All Children’s Hospital child care class remember the graphic lesson about shaken-baby syndrome. We vicariously join a hip-hop class with a forty-something, curious reporter.

This book follows in the tradition of the Tampa Herald, the area’s first newspaper. First published in January 1854, its pages reveal much about the details of life in long-ago Tampa. This book, too, is a record—a snapshot, if you will—of the Tampa Bay area, which not only tells today’s readers what to expect when they come here, but also leaves future readers a record of what life was like in this place, at this time.

Readers interested in how news organizations gather, process, and package information can look for a Close-up about the Poynter Institute, a think-tank training center for journalists and other media professionals.

As the newsboys used to cry: Read all about it!