The Tampa Bay Times is, um, flooding the zone with its coverage of St. Petersburg’s sewage scandal.
Heavy rain during Hurricane Hermine overloaded the city’s sewer systems, sending millions of gallons of sewage to flow into streets and waterways. Since that time, the Times has been knee-deep in the muck — sometimes literally — with this story.
It’s the first hard-news story to hit City Hall since reporter Mark Puente returned from a (almost Pulitzer Prize-winning) stint at the Baltimore Sun.
Puente took that gig, in part, because he did not believe St. Pete was enough of hard-news kind of town. The latest scandal has changed his tune.
“The St. Pete sewer crisis has it all,” Puente wrote on his Facebook page. (W)histleblower, tainted water, a federal and state investigation, Republicans and Democrats taking shots at each other, a mayor doing exactly what he said he wouldn’t do to taint the process and now enters what some call scapegoats.”
On Wednesday, St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman announced he was replacing two top city wastewater officials.
And U.S. Rep. David Jolly‘s has called for a federal environmental probe.
Puente rightly gives a lot of credit to his colleague, Charlie Frago, for his “machine”-like coverage of the multiple developments which have occurred this week. I fthe sewage treatment plants he’s writing about worked as hard and as efficiently as Frago, there probably wouldn’t be a story in the first place.
Several other Times reporters are backing-up Frago and Puente, including Chris O’Donnell and Megan Reeves. Especially good has been Eve Edelheit’s photography, which includes a game-changing shot of partially treated sewage is discharged into the waters of Tampa Bay on Sept. 6, about a quarter of a mile away from a St. Petersburg sewage plant.
Yet, with all this great coverage, I can’t help but think of what’s missing. Nothing in the coverage itself, mind you, just a change in Times personnel since the Puente’s previous time at the newspaper.
Gone is the editor, Heather Urquides, who this blog unceasingly criticized for mismanaging the newspaper’s coverage of its own backyard. I’m not sure who is above Frago and Puente (perhaps its former City Hall reporter turned editor Michael Van Sickler) but the change in tone and operational tempo within the City Hall beat is noticeable.
Frago, Puente, Van Sickler and other Times reporters will bristle at the suggestion that something has changed with their coverage since Urquides departed for a public relations position with WellCare, but if coverage of the sewage scandal is any indication, this is a case of addition by subtraction.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this post.
