He became a statistic in a struggling industry

By CAITLIN ASHWORTH
USFSP Student Reporter

LUTZ – Andrew Caplan left his office earlier this month to cover a meeting of the Pasco County School Board for the Tampa Tribune.

When he got back, both his job and his newspaper were gone.

The Tribune had been sold to its longtime rival, the Tampa Bay Times, which closed the 121-year-old paper and laid off all but a handful of its news staff.

And just like that, Caplan, 27, became a casualty in the disruption that has convulsed the American newspaper industry over the last two decades.

Florida’s newspapers have had a major impact on the history and culture of the state. The Tribune was arguably the state’s most important newspaper in the 1940s and 1950s, and it was still Florida’s second largest paper.

However, the digital age, the Great Recession and self-inflicted wounds have greatly weakened once-prosperous papers, and readers’ habits and loyalties are changing.

Around the country, newspapers are cutting back or closing, and thousands of journalists like Caplan have lost their jobs. The future of the industry is uncertain.

Caplan, who grew up in Citrus County, was well into his 20s when he decided to pursue a career in journalism.

At first, he said, he thought he might become an X-Ray technician, but quickly changed his mind.

“I realized I don’t like blood and broken bones,” he said.

As he and his father kicked around career ideas one day, Caplan said there were two things he loved to do: watch sports and talk about sports.

“If curling was on TV, I would watch it,” he said.

After mulling over potential employment options in radio, commentary and journalism, he decided to become a sports reporter.

Going to games and talking with players and coaches seemed like the ultimate fan experience, Caplan said. And you get paid to do it.

As he pursued an associate degree at the College of Central Florida in Ocala and then a bachelor’s at USF St. Petersburg, Caplan supported himself as a self-employed process server, delivering subpoenas to people who were behind on their child support, mortgage, rent and credit card payments.

The pay was good and the work was usually mundane – until the day he encountered a barefoot, bearded man with booze on his breath and a gun, which he pointed at Caplan.

“It is dangerous to constantly knock on strangers’ doors day in and day out,” Caplan wrote in a column for the USFSP student newspaper.

“After the event, I asked myself, ‘Is this what I want to do for the next 20-30 years?’

“Hell, no! I want to be a sports writer.”

At the student paper, he covered university and local sports. He created and co-hosted a weekly sports show on the USF student radio station, and he covered high school football games for the Times.

But he knew he needed to broaden his resume, “to do more than just sports.”

During the 2015 spring semester, Caplan interned at Equality Florida Action, an organization focused on equal rights and security of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

The ban on same-sex marriage was lifted in June 2015 and, through his internship, Caplan documented the effects it had on LGBT people.

A lesbian couple with two children tied the knot. A Sumter County clerk was honored to wed same-sex couples. And a teacher married her partner of 26 years and finally felt comfortable enough to share the news with co-workers.

Caplan said the internship gave him the opportunity to learn about things happening nationally and talk to local people whom it affected. It helped expand his breadth as a reporter and strengthened his skills as a feature writer, he said.

Over the summer of 2015, Caplan interned at his hometown paper, the Citrus County Chronicle, a daily with a circulation of 26,000, and graduated from USFSP.

The internship led to a full-time job with the paper as staff reporter on education, city government and anything else that needed covering, like a feature on actor Miles Teller, who grew up in Lecanto and frequently returns for visits.

“I learned how to write fast and on the fly,” Caplan said.

He also learned how to design pages using Adobe InDesign. On some Saturdays, he would design five or six pages for the Sunday section.

When the Tribune reached out to him about an open position in Pasco County, he jumped at the opportunity. He was hired in March.

He knew that the Tribune lagged far behind the Times in circulation and prestige, he said, but moving from a small-town daily to a big-city metro was too good to pass up.

Mainly working out of the Tribune’s office in a business park in Lutz, Caplan covered county schools, Dade City government and features for a Pasco news section that was distributed on Fridays and Sundays.

It was obvious that the Tribune was struggling. He was often the only journalist in the office, and his editor was there only once a week.

But the paper’s sudden demise was still a jolt, leaving Caplan and the paper’s other 265 employees at loose ends.

For now, Caplan is back at the Chronicle, covering his old beats. But he is only a stringer – paid per story – not a full-time staff member with salary and benefits.

He has applied to attend USFSP this fall to seek a master’s in digital journalism, which could “give me a leg up” in an industry where digital is supplanting print. He might apply for full-time jobs at other papers, might start a sports blog to get more experience.

After all, he still wants to be a sports reporter.