The January 1, 2012, front page of the first edition of the Tampa Bay Times.
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Type | Daily newspaper |
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Format | Broadsheet |
Owner(s) | Times Publishing Company |
Editor | Paul Tash |
Founded | 1884 |
Language | English |
Headquarters | 490 First Avenue South St. Petersburg, Florida 33701 United States |
Circulation | 240,024 daily 403,229 (2011) |
OCLC number | 5920090 |
Website | tampabay |
The Tampa Bay Times, previously named the St. Petersburg Times through 2011, is an American newspaper published in St. Petersburg, Florida. It has won twelve Pulitzer Prizes since 1964, and in 2009, won two in a single year for the first time in its history. It is published by the Times Publishing Company, which is owned by The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit journalism school directly adjacent to the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus. Many issues are available through Google News Archive. A daily electronic version is also available for the Amazon Kindle and iPad.
The newspaper traces its origins to the West Hillsborough Times, a weekly newspaper established in Dunedin, Florida on the Pinellas peninsula in 1884. At the time, neither St. Petersburg nor Pinellas County existed; the peninsula was part of Hillsborough County. The paper was published weekly in the back of a pharmacy and had a circulation of 480. It subsequently changed ownership six times in seventeen years. In December 1884 it was bought by A.C. Turner, who moved it to Clear Water Harbor (modern Clearwater, Florida). In 1892 it moved to St. Petersburg, and by 1898 it was officially renamed the St. Petersburg Times.
The Times became bi-weekly in 1907, and began publication six days a week in 1912. Paul Poynter, a publisher originally from Indiana, bought the paper in September 1912 and converted to a seven-day paper, though it was rarely financially stable. Paul's son, Nelson Poynter, became editor in 1939 and took majority control of the paper in 1947, and set about improving the paper's finances and prestige. Nelson Poynter controlled the paper until his death in 1978, when he willed the majority of the stock to the non-profit Poynter Institute. In November 1986, the Evening Independent was merged into the Times. Poynter was succeeded by Eugene Patterson (1978 to 1988), Andrew Barnes (1988 to 2004) and Paul C. Tash (2004 to present).