The newspaper traces its origin to the
West Hillsborough Times, a weekly newspaper established in
Dunedin, Florida, on the
Pinellas Peninsula in 1884. At the time, neither St. Petersburg nor
Pinellas County existed; the peninsula was part of
Hillsborough County. The paper was published weekly in the back of a pharmacy and had a circulation of 480. It subsequently changed ownership six times in seventeen years. In December 1884, it was bought by A. C. Turner, The
Times became
bi-weekly in 1907, and began publication six days a week in 1912. Paul Poynter, a publisher originally from Indiana, bought the paper in September 1912 and converted to a seven-day paper, though it was rarely financially stable. Paul's son,
Nelson Poynter, became editor in 1939 and took majority control of the paper in 1947, and set about improving the paper's finances and prestige. Nelson Poynter controlled the paper until his death in 1978, when he willed the majority of the stock to the non-profit
Poynter Institute. and Mark Katches (2018–present). On January 1, 2012, the
St. Petersburg Times was renamed the
Tampa Bay Times; this stemmed from a 2006 decision of a lawsuit with
Media General, at the time the publishers of the
Times competing newspaper,
The Tampa Tribune, which allowed that paper to keep its exclusive right to use the name of its defunct sister paper,
The Tampa Times, for five years after the decision. On May 3, 2016, the
Times acquired its longtime competitor
The Tampa Tribune, with the latter publication immediately ceasing publishing and
Tribune features and some writers expected to be merged into the
Times. As reported by other local media outlets in the Tampa Bay area at the time of this acquisition, for many years the
Tampa Tribune was considered to be the more
conservative newspaper in the region, while the
Tampa Bay Times was thought of as more
liberal. The
Times sold the paper in 2016 to Sun Coast Media Group. In October 2019, the paper laid off seven newsroom employees. The
Times received $8.5 million in federal loans from the
Paycheck Protection Program by July 2020 during the
COVID-19 pandemic. By this point, they had reduced delivery to two days per week. They had also cut 11 journalists' jobs through layoffs expected before the pandemic. In August 2024, the paper announced it will eliminate 60 jobs, amounting to 20% of total staff. On October 9–10, 2024, the Tampa Bay Times building was severely damaged during
Hurricane Milton by a nearby construction crane that collapsed onto the building. ==PolitiFact.com==