Many readers are probably wondering why their Tampa Bay Times on Sunday didn’t have news of an assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump. It’s a fair question.
For the past three years, we’ve printed our Wednesday and Sunday newspapers in Lakeland. Most readers have grown accustomed to the reality that evening sports scores and late-breaking news won’t arrive in the printed version of the paper. Still, it can be jarring when absent. Glaringly so, when the news is momentous.
The front page for Sunday’s paper is normally the last page we send on a Saturday. The July 14 edition was no different. We approved the last page and transmitted it to the Lakeland plant at 4:49 p.m. — an hour and 25 minutes before the shooting in Pennsylvania.
As soon as we became aware of the circumstances at the Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a team of newsroom staffers reassembled to publish the news on tampabay.com. We sent a mobile push alert and a special newsletter to all subscribers and posted the stories on social media. A staff-written story that included responses to the shooting from around Florida and beyond generated about 225,000 page views in a mere matter of hours.
A separate team tackled the front page for print.
It would be the first time we called to “stop the presses” for a news event since we moved our printing operations to Lakeland in 2021.
But there would be challenges.
By the time the Associated Press moved its first alert at 6:45 p.m., the presses in Lakeland were already running. Details were still sketchy. At that point, authorities had not confirmed that a shooting occurred. The first alerts from the wires described what had happened as “an apparent shooting.”
We went about remaking the front page to catch as many of the printed papers as possible. Even when the presses stop, time marches on. We pushed to get the news out as soon as possible to resume the press run.
Instead of remaking multiple pages, which would have taken considerably longer, we removed the centerpiece photograph on a story about heat exposure at summer camps and prepared to substitute a photo from the Associated Press in Pennsylvania. By then, most of the printed newspapers were already off the presses, set to be sorted and prepared for delivery trucks for the drive back to Tampa Bay.
At 7:32 p.m. we sent a front page with a photo and caption of former President Trump, blood streaking across his face, his fist pumped in the air, surrounded by Secret Service agents.
Our front-page remake caught about 12,000 copies of the paper, a fraction of the total print circulation. Given the timing of the news, we were able to provide only limited information in the caption while referring readers to tampabay.com for more coverage. I commend the newsroom for doing what we could under the circumstances. But in hindsight, you always wonder if we could have done more. Some readers who didn’t get the final edition in print accused us of deliberate bias for ignoring a huge news story. Some who did get the remade front page still felt we underplayed such consequential news. It’s a legitimate criticism without the context of early print deadlines and a ticking clock.
The newsroom got a fuller story of the shooting onto page 3A for the e-Newspaper. That version included Trump’s statement about being shot. In the meantime, we kept updating the website through the evening and early Sunday morning.
We lean on our three distinct products — the printed newspaper, the e-Newspaper replica version and our 24/7 website — to bring you the news. Each product has strengths and weaknesses. Together, they fill gaps the others can’t.
In print, the Times provides analysis, depth and enterprise reporting, expertly curated, designed and packaged in a news magazine format. The e-Newspaper offers that same curated approach, with some additional content, in a digital format. And tampabay.com serves as our main vehicle to share breaking news. Together, these three products work to provide the most complete picture of the news.