Tampa Bay Times

The Times began in the back room of a pharmacy in Dunedin, printed on a hand-cranked press. Back then it was a weekly paper called the West Hillsborough Times. From the start its mission has been to report local news without fear or favor.

The Poynter era

Indiana publisher Paul Poynter bought the paper in 1912. His son Nelson Poynter became general manager in 1938 and editor in 1939, and led the Times for more than 40 years. He invested in a new printing plant and pushed for wide use of color, graphics and offset printing.

Before his death in 1978, Nelson Poynter left the paper, then the *St. Petersburg Times*, to a nonprofit school for journalists that later took his name. Because of that gift, the Times stays locally and privately owned, free of the pressures that chain newspapers face.

Today

• Owned by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which makes it one of the few locally owned, fully independent news organizations in the US
• In 2016 it acquired its former rival, the *Tampa Tribune*, and became the largest newspaper in the southeastern United States
• Winner of 14 Pulitzer Prizes, including the 2022 prize for Investigative Reporting for the *Poisoned* project
• Reaches more than 1 million people a week in the Tampa Bay region