Tampa Times

Not to be confused with Tampa Bay Times.
The Tampa Times
TypeDaily newspaper
FormatBroadsheet
Owner(s)Tampa Publishing Company
Founded1893; 131 years ago (1893)
Ceased publication1982 (1982)

The Tampa Times, or Tampa Daily Times, was a daily newspaper founded in Tampa, Florida, in 1893. It was started by the consolidation of two newspapers by the Tampa Publishing Company, whose vice president was W. B. Henderson, a leading businessperson in Tampa. D.B. McKay was the publisher.[1]

The newspaper was an early leader in broadcasting, first putting WDAE 1250 AM on the air in 1922 (now on 620 AM).[2] Then in 1947, an FM station was added, WDAE-FM 105.7 (now WMTX 100.7 FM). Also in the late 1940s, the company applied for a broadcast television station license and was denied.

In 1952, the Tampa Times was acquired by its rival daily newspaper, the Tampa Tribune, which had a television station.[3][4]

The Tampa Tribune continued printing the Tampa Times for a number of decades,[3] maintaining the "Times" moniker in competition with the St. Petersburg Times, another newspaper in the Tampa Bay area.

After the Tampa Tribune stopped publishing its Tampa Times edition in 1982, it continued to hold the rights on the name, leading to a lawsuit filed by Media General, owner of the Tampa Tribune, against the St. Petersburg Times.[5] The two companies reached an agreement in 2006, by which the Media General keep its exclusive right to use of Tampa Times for another five years; the window expired in 2011, and on January 1, 2012, the St. Petersburg Times was renamed the Tampa Bay Times.[5]

In 2016, the Tampa Bay Times bought the Tampa Tribune, effectively consolidating the history of the original 1893 Tampa Times into its present-day namesake.[6]

  1. ^ "The Tampa daily times". Library of Congress.
  2. ^ Information from Broadcasting Yearbook 1950 page 115
  3. ^ a b Solomon, Josh (2018-04-04). "50 years: A newspaper history of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr". Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  4. ^ Monopoly, United States Congress Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust and (5 January 1968). "The Failing Newspaper Act: Hearings, Ninetieth Congress, First [and Second] Session[s], on S. 1312 ..." U.S. Government Printing Office – via Google Books.
  5. ^ a b Deggans, Eric (2011-10-31). "The St. Petersburg Times will become the Tampa Bay Times on Jan. 1". St. Petersburg Times. Archived from the original on 2012-02-08. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  6. ^ Yu, Roger (2016-05-03). "'Tampa Bay Times' buys, shuts down rival 'Tampa Tribune'". USA Today. Retrieved 2020-08-28.