It was a bittersweet evening. I attended the showing of “Stop the Presses” at the Tampa Theatre this past week on May 3rd. Filmmaker Deborah Kerr intended it to be a documentary about the Tampa Tribune, filming a day in the life of a newspaper. However, it became much more than that. She was able to chronicle the last press run at at 202 S. Parker Street (March of 2016) and follow the last few months of the Tampa Tribune. Her husband Buddy Kerr, a 30 year operations employee, had a front row seat for the end of the paper. The newspaper was sold in May of 2016 to the St Pete Times and was immediately shut down. This film showed the end of a great newspaper and paid homage to its many employees.
There were five of us car pooling to Tampa with much anticipation. Four of us had ties to the Tribune going back 30, 40, or 50 years. We took a drive around the block to see what was left of the Tribune building downtown. It’s just a pile of rubble now but it had once been home to so many employees. There will be condos on that spot in the near future. At the theatre there was time before the film to see old friends and former coworkers. I saw my original boss who hired me. I was a 23 year old Spring Hill delivery carrier back in 1975. I saw others from news, circulation, advertising, packaging, and the press room. Years had gone by and there was indeed life after Tribune. There were lots of hugs and greetings all around.
The film started with a quick look inside the downtown building before the demolition. Dark and eerie. There were piles of debris everywhere, an empty shell of a building. The documentary went back and took you through a day in the life of creating a newspaper. It was November 2015, about 6 months from the end. The news department was shown in meetings discussing stories and photos. All the reporters knew their assignments. You got to see what it took to get a story from the street to the computer to the paper. Then the pages were set up and sent to the pressroom for the printing. Many of the current pressmen had been there 15 or 20 years. There were no longer 8 or 9 men working the presses, but just 5 or 6. The presses running are the lifeblood of the paper. They are noisy and they are fast! It is amazing to see how many copies can print in an evening and get out to delivery trucks. Then the papers are off to distribution centers and to your door. This was the original intent, I believe, to show the Tribune average day and chronicle its decline and its circulation challenges. The Tribune had been around for 121 years and would survive. However the end was closer than everyone thought. The building downtown was sold late in 2015. The talk was about finding a new and smaller place for employees in Tampa. They would also outsource the printing of the paper. All interviewed felt the Tribune would go on just not in that building. As we sat in our theatre seats we knew with a sense of dread that it wouldn’t happen. It’s like watching the movie Titanic. You know the ship sinks and you can’t change the outcome.
There was an emotional final press run in March 2016. There was a cake, family, and many hugs and tears. It would be the last Tribune printed at this building on Parker Street. Plans were in the works to have the Lakeland Ledger print the Tampa Tribune from now on. Those plans did not work out. The St Pete Times took over printing our paper instead. We knew it was bad news to have your former rival now print your paper. The final day of the Tribune still took most by surprise. It was a day like any other until the afternoon meetings to announce both the sale and the closing of the Tampa Tribune. It was immediate. There was no final edition. Employees were escorted out. It was over. There were severance packages. Some were offered jobs with the Times. However, most of the 600 employees knew that it was a sad end to their newspaper career. Watching Buddy Kerr walk out with his box of possessions and seeing him stroll down the empty hallways told it all. At the end of the film we got a handout, a FINAL EDITION. In it was column after column from various workers and reporters, saying what they wanted to say. It was what they never had a chance to say last year. It was their farewell to us, the reader. They felt we deserved it.
More than half of us in attendance had some connection to the Tribune and you could feel the camaraderie in the theatre. It was quite a night.