The St. Petersburg Times, owned by the Poynter Institute, is going through a major revamp on May 19, in an effort to emphasize content valued by readers and cut down costs.

The daily features section, Floridian, will be published on Sundays only. The business section will merge with the B section metro news.

TV listings, comics and games, and some other syndicated elements from the features section, will be moved to a new section called Baylink.

As mentioned though, the move is (primarily) aimed at cutting costs, and a few elements will disappear from the paper, including items such as stock listings (many papers have eliminated them), the Parenting column and the Working section.

Staffers have worked to create "a more streamlined paper during the week, eliminating material readers may not value so much, and, in the midst of a serious recession, cutting costs," wrote Times media critic Eric Deggans in a blog post.

As Deggans is honest enough to admit, "It's a tough spot for a media critic to negotiate; I'm not an ombudsman with a contract guaranteeing employment no matter what I write, so I've tried to respect the organization's need to plan while pulling together this blog post."

In the end, it seems that even newspapers with a nonprofit model (the Times is in fact for profit, but has a peculiar ownership structure) are getting hit by the struggles of the US newspaper industry.

"We're not insulated from the pressure, and these changes are evidence of that fact," said Deggans.

A good share of comments to his blog post came from unhappy readers.

Source: TampaBay.com The Feed