Q&A with Paul Tash
Paul Tash liked to tell some employees that newspapers are a seasonal business, and last week he told what's left of the Tampa Bay Times that his season as CEO has come to an end. He will also step down as chairman of Times Publishing Co.'s board of directors on July 1.—Creative Loafing Tampa Bay
Read a full, minimally-edited, Q&A with Tash below. I really appreciate you giving me some insight into some of the criticisms that I've heard and I have observed and whatnot, but I kind of like being late to stories like this sometimes, because you've had some time to talk to all the people who probably would have had been ringing you all week, and all the emotions, so a few days after making it public, how are you feeling this morning? This is the right decision at the right time. And I know that in my head, and so despite my long and loving relationship with this news organization, that knowledge helps it feel right in my heart. As far as the emotions of it, now that it's final and it's out what have you felt? Is it like this mix of joy and sadness or relief? You were the longest serving chairman and CEO of the Times So far. Correct about that. Nobody can argue that it has been the most difficult time, probably in the history of newspapers. You've made a lot of tough decisions and had to see a lot of people out the door. Is there any sense of relief for you? Obviously, you know it's the right time, but what is it like? Is it relieving? Is it sad? Nerve racking? I mean, there's a rich mix of emotions. I'm glad to have the news shared with my colleagues and the world. I've been tremendously gratified by the kinds of responses that I'm getting. I'm extraordinarily pleased for Conan and for the Times that Conan is in position to take up the work and the responsibilities that I've been doing. I feel good about the contributions that the Times has made to the community while I've been associated with it—not just over the last 18 years, but over the last 44 years. Since I came here as a reporter. It's been a wonderful ride for me, and I know it's been difficult. There have been some hard things, some very hard things, over the last 15 years, but if it were easy, there wouldn't be as much satisfaction in having done the work well. Nelson Poynter put in the system of the outgoing chairman selecting the next one, and I know that you've been pondering who your successor would be since the day you took the job. When did you know for certain that it was Conan? Over the last few months. Did you know that you're going to retire in July before you made the selection and knew it was Conan, or did you want to make sure you knew who would succeed you before you decided to retire? I thought succession had to be in place before I would decide to retire. I talked a little bit to Conan yesterday and we talked about the things that the Times has to do going forward. Probably a weird time for him because a lot of people probably ask him about you and why should he have to speak for another person, but for you, as far as selecting him, is tapping somebody from the business side right now at this critical time the only way for the times to survive? Was there an option for somebody more on the journalism side—and I know his background in newspapers and his belief in high-quality journalism—but this is a break. Was it essential for the Times to see its way through whatever's about to happen next? I think people from any variety of backgrounds could have come to the job and done it well. As it has happened, in the last three times since Mr. Poynter's death, it has been someone who started in journalism taking the job, and in fact Conan started his career as a journalist. So I don't think that that is the most significant difference between this succession and selection and the ones that have come before. Conan like the other three people has a deep appreciation and puts a very high value on journalism as the core mission of the Times. I think what's different is you do see in Conan a recognition that the the opportunities going forward are going to be much more digital and the success and growth that we've had in those digital dimensions, since Conan's arrival and since Mark's arrival—and a greater emphasis by the company in general on the digital opportunities—is a recognition that we need people who will be very keenly focused and also quite talented in those regards. I kind of asked Conan a little bit about this because he'll obviously be the person to make the decision. The gist I got is that it really is a economic situation and those types of factors will have to be considered and those types of factors are very uncertain right now, but Conan could be the person who brings the Times back to seven-day printing—and obviously with printing and delivery comes delivery and those hiccups and things like that—is there any desire from you to try to find a way to increase printing frequency before you leave in July? Or are we going to be kind of looking at you know, two days of a physical paper and the weekly TBT for a while—I know there's an E edition every day... Again, as Conan said, that's a question that will depend very much on the customer demand both the customer demand among advertisers—what they need—and also the customer demand among readers. I find that our audience has come to understand how robust the journalism of the Times is, whether it's delivered in print or whether it's delivered electronically. I mean, the news of this transition, of my decision to retire, and Conan's appointment as my successor was in "the paper" on a day that the Times was not on paper. And it seems to have gotten very wide attention, so I think our audience and our readers are coming to understand how robust the Times journalism is in all the forms that we publish, whether that's the E-edition, whether that's on tampabay.com or whether that's in print. Now, we did just bring back—as you would recognize—the TBT Weekend edition in the Times itself. That is a reflection that the world is starting to come back—even despite this latest surge of the virus—as some of the events and aspects of life that will make that return a good time for us. As an aside to that and talking about the world returning to normal, do you think one of your last acts or decisions that you have to make will be bringing folks back to the office, whether it's St. Pete or the Tampa office and things like that or do you foresee a more true hybrid situation? We've made the decision to bring people back to the office a number of times, we just haven't been able to act on it because the damn virus keeps firing up, but I think we'll be back—I think we'll be having more people back in the office well before I retire. That's still my hope. I'm a Midwestern optimist at heart. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. Nobody could predict the virus and the way it would affect the way we interact with each other, but how much do you miss seeing everybody frequently in the office, and how bittersweet is it that you will be retiring after two years of not seeing everybody on a more frequent basis? Well, I miss them a lot. We've done a tremendous job of staying vibrant and creative throughout but I do very much miss those sort of happenstance encounters with my colleagues and the everyday give and take that you can have in the office when you're together that you don't have when everyone's working remotely. I would have liked to have brought everybody back to the office a month after we scattered on March the 13th of 2020, but it's gone a little longer than that. I want to kind of get into some of the things that weren't in that digital piece that you mentioned, about your tenure and I want to ask you about the arena and obviously, one of the first big developments was that 12 Year $30 million deal at Amalie which was extended obviously with three years left, at the time, establishing regionality for the paper, and that kind of recognition was important to you, especially since you were still a few years away from buying the Trib. When you look back on those decisions to spend that kind of money—and I haven't talked to you a lot so I have no inside angle to even try to guess how you would feel or whether you're a person who regrets doing things—but is that a decision as far as that amount of money that you might have done differently? As far as the naming rights goes? I think the decision to put our name on what was the Ice Palace and became the St. Pete Times forum was a very important step in that process of becoming the regional news organization for all of Tampa Bay. I think it helped us, I think our logic at the time holds up. One, it helped us establish ourselves as local in a place where our name could signal that we were from somewhere else. It helped establish ourselves with younger people, particularly, and to be associated with fun. And I think it helped establish ourselves, deepen our connections with national advertisers who would see the Tampa Bay market as a single market and who would recognize that the St. Pete Times, though it didn't have "Tampa" in its name, was very much a part of the Tampa market. So I think all those things held up. It was a unanimous vote of the Times board of directors to do that at the time, and I had decided we wouldn't move forward unless it was unanimous; and after a very full consideration, people did that. I think it was an important move for us to really get serious about being a news organization that would represent all of Tampa Bay. And we're not gonna blame you for people calling Tampa "Tampa Bay," either as "Tampa Bay, Florida" as if Tampa and St. Pete were all weren't separate places. I told Joe Lopano we ought to change the name of the airport to Tampa Bay International Airport, but he's disinclined to do that. That's funny. Oh, that'd be a fun interview, even on the airport's anniversary, that'd be great. You mentioned putting yourselves in front of younger people. As a somewhat younger person, I'm 36, I will say that when you did launch TBT*two, with some of your high school and teenage reporters, it definitely drew me to the paper a young person, and I think it made me, without me realizing it, realize that I could one day work at a newspaper. So I do appreciate the decision making behind that. And I'm grateful that you did that as well. Paul Tash I'm glad it worked out for you. Yeah, so far. You never know, right? I'm always just like, "Well, I just get fired any day. Who knows?" But that's just a personal thing. When the plant was sold, some of the money went to return the investment on FBN loans including your own, and I mean, me personally, I can totally see how you'd want to make sure that the FBN loans were handled before you left. But folks have also criticized you for not retiring until you got the money back. What do you say to people who will grumble about that? First I haven't heard that criticism. You may be correct, but you're saying something that's not known to me. I might well have retired had the pandemic not hit and the plant was still in use seven days a week, and we hadn't sold it. I might well have retired without having that loan fully repaid but having an extended and having things on a stable footing going forward. So we didn't sell the plant to repay the loan. We sold the plant because the pandemic cratered the advertising market and we therefore shifted to two days a week of publication. And there was a relentless logic that ended ultimately with the sale of the plant. One of the saddest days in my career was the last press run at that plant. Yeah. I felt keenly the passing of a great era of newspaper printing and production when those wonderful machines would rumble every day. But the world is going digital, and the pandemic accelerated those trends very, very much. And so, there was a relentless logic that the world has stopped, advertising has cratered, we need to adjust our business plans accordingly, we'll go to two days a week. That plant was built for seven days a week, not two, the tremendous capacity there was being hugely underused. That means that we either need to get bigger and do printing for others, or we need to place our own printing somewhere else in that consolidation. Gannett was disinclined and other publishers were disinclined to come to us. That meant that we needed to place our printing somewhere else. And once that printing is placed somewhere else, then that means that the plant should be sold rather than sit empty as an unproductive asset. So I want to be clear: what drove the sale of the plan was the economic realities and the public health realities of the pandemic, not the need to repay that loan before I retired. I would have been thrilled to see those presses humming every night of the week long past my own retirement. Yeah, most certainly. I mean, I don't know if emotions are scalable, but thinking of just the little amount of responsibility that I've felt for other people in my particular role, I can't imagine what it's like to have to shut down that plant with all those, you know, 150 some odd jobs in there. And then all the history of the plant itself and what the paper coming off the line there means and you can't even measure what that means. I can't imagine what that emotion was for you. And thank you for clearing up the motivation behind tha. I understand that you're definitely in a tricky situation that you are one of the FBN partners—back to my assumption that wanting to pay off that loan before retiring was something you'd want to do before retiring—let's just say you weren't even one of the partners, how wrong was I in that assumption? I do feel a great obligation to the other partners who stepped forward at a very important time and who gave the Times room there to really follow through and position itself for the longer term. I remain deeply grateful to those other people. That said, I was keen to make sure that Times would be able to meet its obligations there, but that's not why we sold the plant. There are a lot of ways; I would have been happy for the Times to repay that loan through the continued operations of the presses and the way the business would run if that had happened. So yes, did I feel a personal obligation as someone who persuaded others that this was a good thing to do—not just as a financial transaction, but as something that would make a real difference in our community—yes, I do feel an obligation to them and to our other stakeholders. And to stay kind of on these lines here, my other question that was in the email, your pay over the years has been criticized, whether it was the sheer figure of the salary—especially as some reporters who spoke to me on background, not in the very recent past but not too far off—some were making under 40K on entry. Your pay was criticized, the pay cut you took was criticized, although yours was percentage wise, larger than the others. In hindsight, do you think that you could have taken a deeper pay cut to either get some use that money to retain or hire staff or or even taken a deeper pay cut as a symbolic measure for the newsroom? Is that something that you think about? So that's why I did take a deeper pay cut; and it's not just for the newsroom, but for the rest of the company. Sometimes in coverage of newspapers, there's a focus only on the newsrooms, but there's a lot of employees in the company and I wanted people to know that I felt, as well, the sacrifice we were asking others to make and I would, I would do that and then some. OK, and forgive me if I'm sorry if you feel like I'm poking you or pestering you—I truly am not—but do you feel like you if you knew it would change attitudes across the entire company, would you have taken an even deeper one? Or am I just treading on kind of something that's kind of... I'm gonna make two or three quick statements, Ray. One is, I have never had any complaints about my own compensation; whatever it is, whether it was as a reporter making $13,000 a year or in my current job making whatever it is—that's a matter of public record—I have no complaints about my pay, because it's been an honor to do the work. There were days I couldn't believe they were paying me to do this job. As a young reporter, I would marvel, "I can't believe they're paying us to do this." Second, my pay over the years is a matter of public record, so you could go back and look at the Poynter Institute 990s from 2004, and even previous to that, and you would have a record of my pay you can judge for yourself. I asked you about a salary as Chairman of the Board of Trustees, but obviously you make $0 doing that, and it's my assumption that you continue to make $0 after your retirement in that role, so apologies for sending that undercooked question along in the email. To continue on some of the more tumultuous difficult parts of the history, and thinking of the Trib. I somewhat feel comfortable asking you this because you've also been comfortable with making hard decisions and having to do those kinds of things. But I was thinking about this column that Joe Henderson wrote a while back. He was commemorating the five year anniversary of the sale of the Tribune and he had an anecdote about when you spoke to them. Henderson wrote that you didn't want any video record of your words. And Henderson said he thought it was strange because newspaper's are about transparency—especially the Times. Henderson also criticized not being able to put out a farewell edition. He said that you said that you didn't believe in long goodbyes. Looking back on that day, is there anything you would do differently about handling the acquisition in those last moments for those particular Tribune employees? So at the outset of that meeting with the Tribune employees in their big meeting room, recognizing what was about to happen and recognizing the gravity and the grief of that moment, I did suggest as one newspaper man to other newspaper people, "Let's give this moment some real dignity. And let's not have our cameras and our phones and our other devices on." I did say that, and I'm glad I did. That was out of respect and regard for the very sad moment in the life of the Tribune that was about to happen. Second, we did publish, the following Sunday, a retrospective section honoring the Tampa Tribune and its life and the role it had played in the community. I don't know if you remember that or not. I do, and I also remember it because CL also dedicated its paper that week to the Trib, we made it look like the Trib—I wasn't here at the time, so speaking as a reader at the time. I know that the Times did put out that retrospective, and I know that printing a newspaper is expensive. But to Henderson's critique that that staff would have liked to put out its own final paper. Do you think, this many years later, you would have done that differently and allowed them to do that? I would not have done that differently. And I've heard that criticism, but I've never heard the criticism from anybody in the community. I've never heard that criticism from a reader. I've only heard it from former Tribune staffers. I've never heard that from a reader. And I've never heard that we treated the Tribune or its people badly through that difficult transition. In fact, we treated the Tribune employees—not just in news but in a lot of places—with dignity and compassion. To kind of stay on the Trib because that was a huge deal, obviously, for this community—and obviously nobody could have predicted what happened after that—but many have speculated that the Tribune was on its way out anyway. I've heard that there were other entities looking at buying that paper that land, maybe the Church of Scientology—which as an aside, you know, I will always credit the Times for its coverage of Scientology and its ability to even publish those stories, and the legal backend for those stories—but when you finally got to open the Tribune's books after the sale, what were your immediate thoughts on how buying the paper was going to affect the Time's strategy going forward? We had a pretty thorough look at the Tribune finances before we bought it, that's one. And two, I'm not aware of any other buyers in competition with us at the end. In the beginning of this conversation, or in the middle of it, we kind of talked about how you miss these happenstance run-ins with your colleagues on both sides of the newspaper, but also that you've been able to adapt and continue to have this kind of communication. I think you're pretty famous for having all staff meetings and all forum meetings. I talked to a lot of people over the years of reporting or trying to report on the Times. I haven't really ever been able to get on the record comments, but one particular person spoke to me on the record yesterday, and we're just kind of talking about some of those meetings and they expressed that there were times when your message was overwhelming. What I'm getting at is that you're pretty famous for saying the hard truth, and then I don't know if you even remember this, Paul, but this person mentioned a story you told in the auditorium—maybe was the Holocaust Museum, I don't remember—but the story was about two sled racers trying to get to the South Pole and one trying to keep all of his dogs fed; he never made it the other barely made it but only after having to lighten the load as far as dogs and things like that. I understand the power of storytelling and framing things a certain way, but this person I spoke to kind of felt like, "Man, I was grim. I don't know if I can handle this." Do you feel like sometimes it was too dark of a message for the newsroom although you were right there in it and you saw how dark it was going to get and how bad it was going to get? Got a couple observations there, Ray. First, that's actually a chapter of history. I think it was on the 100th anniversary, there was some attention to the expedition—there was a race between a Norwegian team and an English team to get to the South Pole, to be the first in the age of the great explorers. This isn't just some Tash story... Yeah, yeah, I'm not suggesting that you made this up. There was a Norwegian team and an English team. The English team had a very complicated plan. They were going to use horses and dogs, and they had a lot of different equipment, they had more people and more resources, but it was a very complicated plan and it ran into some problems. The Norwegian team had a very simple and much smaller scale of their expedition. They were fast and simple, and the English were complicated and slow. The Norwegians got to the South Pole first and made it out successfully. It's one thing to get there, and then the other thing is to get back to safety. The English team not only ended in failure, but ended in disaster. And so the point of that story was "simple and fast beats complicated and slow." So that was the point of that. Now, in terms of my approach. I am an optimist. I'm from the Midwest. And I am a genuine and natural optimist, but I also recognize that the optimism has to be authentic about what the challenges are going to be. And you have to be able to recognize what those challenges are so that you can surmount them because if you try to avoid the hard decisions, some very hard results will be forced on you. And I've tried to be clear with our colleagues at the Times whenever I thought things were going to get a little rough. I tried to tell him that so that it wouldn't be a surprise, but I've also told him that so that we can, together, be confident we're going to find our way through tough times. And we have. And I know we're at 30 minutes here. I don't want to keep you much longer, and I will say I don't have very many more of these super pressing or probing questions for you. I appreciate your candidness with me. I never got to ask you a lot of questions, just how it is, but this one just popped into my head. You're obviously outgoing and you've been here for a long time. We're two different entities, doing different things in a lot of ways, but how do you see the relationship between Creative Loafing Tampa Bay and the Times in our coexistence together in this market? I don't really have an answer on that, Ray. I don't know that there's much of a connection. I mean, there's plenty of room for everybody here in the market, and I wish Creative Loafing all the success in the world as they figure out their own way forward. Throughout this conversation, you mentioned that, you know, a lot of people haven't brought these criticisms directly to you, and I think you know better than anybody that as time goes on, people move on and they start to focus on other ideas and, and we'll move further and further away from Paul Tash as the chairman of the Times—is there anything that you feel like people don't know about you that you'd like them to understand and your time here that you haven't said elsewhere, or perhaps hasn't been said more explicitly or through a loud enough megaphone? You know, when I got here in 1978, as a reporter, I thought I would be here three or four years. I could not have imagined how important the Times would become in my life. It has held me in its embrace longer than my mother, my wife or my daughters. And so it's a little jarring to think about my life beyond the Tampa Bay Times, but I'm sure it will be a wonderful and rich chapter to come, though it will be different from the last four-plus decades. Yeah, gosh, I wish I could talk to you one more time in, like, September or something because you mentioned how jarring and difficult it is to imagine your life after the Times, and that was gonna be my question for you: "What the heck are you going to do now?" Obviously, you'll stay on at Poynter, and you'll obviously still be a part of a lot of your colleagues' lives, but what do you want to do? You want to go on vacation? Are there some books you've been meaning to read or write? The first thing I'm going to do in retirement is to help decide how I want to spend my retirement. So that's the great thing about it, the chance to figure out what I want to do. Alright. Cool. Well, you have my phone number if you think of anything else that you want to say. I appreciate you having this entire conversation on the record and being very clear about what you wanted to say and I really appreciate you making time to answer these questions this morning. Congratulations on a very long career, and congratulations on your retirement, and congratulations on all your successes at the Tampa Bay Times. I can't imagine the highs that you felt, the difficult decisions you've had to make, and also the lows of everything that you've been through as well. I can't imagine what your dreams are like and how you sleep, having to have these things on your shoulder. So I really appreciate you making the time to talk to me today. Thanks, Ray. To just sum up by saying while I was chairman, the Times made good on a generational ambition to become the news organization representing all of Tampa Bay. It did that while doing some journalism of great impact at a very high standard. And it achieved both those things in the midst of the worst economic challenges for publishers in at least 100 years. So I get to leave the Times now with a wonderful set of memories and turnover the responsibilities for a place I love to a guy who is terrifically capable and will carry this forward in outstanding fashion. I have no complaints. I will not disagree with you about the kind of work carried out in the time you've been there. So congratulations on that, and I hope you enjoy your retirement and these final few months—I know that they won't be easy. I hope that you get to say goodbye to a lot of your friends in person and shake some hands and hug some people, but I'm sure you'll do a lot of that in your retirement. Hope you have a good weekend. I hope you do, too, and enjoy that two-year-old; time goes too fast.
