Think of all the major awards given out…the Oscars, the Grammys, the Tonys, etc. Then think of all those other noble awards, like the Peabodies. It’s not like St. Petersburg has a lot of Academy Award winners walking around Central Avenue. But we have a newspaper that just won two Pulitzers. The New York Times, with 100 times the reach, won 5. So our little Bad News Bears are on par with the Gray Lady. They’re better than the LA Times, or the Dallas Morning News. The St. Pete Times is the third paragraph in this year’s story announcing the Pulitzer winners. This is the journalistic equivalent of the Rays winning the pennant.
So today, and perhaps today only, if you’re around Atlanta Bread Company or Starbucks and you see someone with one of those green Times ID badges, offer to buy them a cup of coffee. They won’t accept. They can’t. But you can thank them for what they do. Just this week, they brought down a corrupt Speaker of the Florida House. With all my snarkiness, with all my contempt for their ineffective online activities, the Times is still a treasure.
