another ‘out of town newspaper’ in tampa
tommyThe Tampa Tribune, especially Dan Ruth, loves to refer to the St. Pete Times as an “out-of-town newspaper.” When reading the subtle jabs, those of us in the shadows of the St. Pete Times Forum giggle and snicker, and look down our noses somewhere west, beyond the bridges.
Ah… fun times…
But you don’t really want to think about it too much, since the owners of the Tampa Tribune are not in Tampa. They are not even located in Florida. That’s right. Media General has been taking money from the wonderful local businesses in Tampa Bay, and sending some of that dough to the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia.
But wait! There’s MORE!
Ya see, it’s not enough to suck money out of Tampa Bay to enrich another part of the United States. Now they are gonna be sending money even further.
Did you know that the Tampa Tribune has plans to send ad production work to Gurgaon? In case you are wondering, Gurgaon is a suburb of New Delhi, India. Check that map link, and you may notice that India is not quite in the Tampa Bay area, either.
The Trib’s new ad production team, Express KCS promises “World class offshore advertising production for newspapers.” Without all the trouble of supporting your local community and stuff.
So that “out of town newspaper” joke starts to be a bit less funny, doesn’t it?
But wait! There’s (even) MORE!
This April, Media General’s president and chief executive officer Marshall Morton told stockholders that they had successfully “outsourced circulation customer service and telemarketing.”
So I called Trib’s circulation department - (813)TRIBUNE. When asked, phone answerer “Colleen New” does indeed admit that they are located “out of state.” That bummed me out, since Tampa Bay is known as being Call Center central. Turns out that residents of other cities can also have highly specialized skills such as an ability to answer phones. But what city? What state? Must be Google Time.
According to one attendee at a 2007 SNA Circulation Managers’ Conference held in Tampa, Tribune President & Publisher Denise Palmer “gleefully” reported that circulation customer service would be outsourced to the Philippines! The Philippines! And, no - the Philippines can not be found in Tampa Bay, either.
Which makes that “out of town newspaper” reference absolutely morbid.
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June 27th, 2008 at 9:21 am
I recently had a very frustrating experience trying to deal with the Tribune’s customer service department in the Philippines. The system is set up to handle the bulk of the issues, but it chokes on something out of the ordinary. After finding out that the Philippine office couldn’t handle my issue, it was ridiculously difficult to reach someone in Tampa. Many Tampa phone numbers — all the easy-to-find ones — forward you straight to the Philippines. I spoke with several different people, who each gave me a different Tampa-sounding phone number, which I hopefully dialed, only to find myself — again and again — talking to yet another person in the Philippines who simply was not in a position to help me. I finally did cajole someone into giving me a phone number that actually rang on a desk here in Tampa, and that local person was able to resolve my issue. But I did not come away feeling like I was dealing with my hometown newspaper.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:08 am
No wonder they are out of touch.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Gotta love this media consolidation! Media General is first and foremost concerned with the bottom line and shareholder profits. Nothing wrong with that of course. Lots of local news folks laid off or bought off. Nothing wrong with that in the world of business. Support the St Pete Times and their news folks. They are local and not under the thumb of shareholders…yet.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Wendy:
You say “Yet” with the Times. The Times is owned by a non profit (The Poynter Institute) and while I think they’ve been making too many moves specifically to drive down costs lately, they aren’t a target of consolidation.
As for the Tampa Tribune / WFLA and Mother Corporate — with Mother Corporate bleeding red ink everywhere, they would be smarter to sell the Media Center and the Trib/WFLA than continue their negative-PR-cost-cutting campaign.
June 28th, 2008 at 8:47 am
As someone who worked in ad production at the Trib, this just surreal. Does any miss the days of “I Get It Daily”?
June 29th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Well, from how the “HOW DO WE DO IT!” ads on the back of the sports section that I used to see years ago, it’s looked as if the Ads were outsourced years ago :p (grammatically speaking)
July 1st, 2008 at 10:10 pm
I had a Tribune-Philippines experience. My local paper where I work (Trib owned) took over billing for subscriptions but allowed the delivery vendor to keep billing too. So I sent the money the same place I always sent it and got a haughty letter from corporate billing indicating my subscription would be cancelled if I didn’t pay the bill.
A call to the number on the bill got me to the Philippines where a young woman insisted that I “Send in the money, right now.” Just write a check and send it. I explained that I paid electronically through my bank and she explained that was my problem. Send a check, she repeated.
I lost patience and thumbed through the internal phone list finally reaching a young man who checked the record and discovered that I was about four months ahead on my payments.
This, folks, is only circulation. Imagine if the “going forward” folk are making those kind of boneheaded mistakes in advertising!
July 13th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Wow the TRIB really sucks big one..