SoccerShout.com

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Dateline: Tampa, Fl, July 1st 2008.  It’s the evening in the newsroom of the Tampa Tribune, a major regional newspaper with a circulation of 225,000.  Most of the staff are assembled for the gut wrenching discussion of layoffs.  All the seats are filled, with many others standing or sitting on desks.

Editor in chief, Janet Coats, rises to her feet.  The room falls silent.  She steps through a list of who has to be let go, and why.

But that’s not all.  If you get to stay around, she tells the staff, things are going to change.  The paper is losing money.  There will be fewer staff, and there must be changes in the way they cover the news.

Then Coats dropped the biggest bombshell of the night.  Like all newspapers, the Tribune has dipped its toe in the website business as well.

“People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune,” she said. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.”

Wow.  Someone really said it.  Someone in a position of power at a newspaper just said that the print edition now plays second fiddle to the website.

Think about what that means to a business that is continuing the centuries-old tradition of print journalism.  But if this feels like the tail is wagging the dog, they need to get ready for a time when the dog is gone and all that’s left is the tail (sorry if that’s a gross analogy!).

Could football learn a lesson here?  Is football’s infatuation with large crowds congregating in football grounds getting in the way of a better model?

Who in a position of power at a football club is going to be the first to stand up and say that the football ground is an add on to the television event, rather than the other way around?

(Tribune story via Jessica DiSilva)