• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 11, 2016

Another big metropolitan daily newspaper is going to the big green recycling bin in the sky, following last week’s surprise announcement that the Tampa Tribune had been acquired, and subsequently closed, by its longtime rival, The Tampa Bay Times.

The new owners shuttered the newspaper immediately, and Tampa Tribune subscribers began receiving the Times instead last Wednesday.

The Tampa Bay Times CEO and chairman Paul Tash noted the harsh realities facing regional newspaper publishing in a press conference announcing the acquisition and closing of the Tribune: “It’s been a rough stretch for newspapers. There are very few cities that are able to sustain more than one daily newspaper, and the Tampa Bay region is not among them.”

As part of the acquisition and closing, the Times will lay off at least 100 Tribune employees, out of a total 265; other Tribune employees will be offered jobs on the Times’ staff. The newspaper previously shared printing facilities, so redundancies in production staff should be minimal.

While it will cease to exist as a standalone newspaper, the Tribune name will continue to appear in a special section appearing twice a week in The Tampa Bay Times in Hillsborough County. The Times will continue printing Centro, a weekly Spanish-language newspaper previously published by the Tribune.

The Tampa Bay Times is actually a relative newcomer to the market, at least by newspaper standards.

Originally The St. Petersburg Times, it established a local edition serving the Tampa area in 1987, firing the opening shot in a decades-long rivalry with the Tribune, which recently celebrated its 123^rd birthday.

Like virtually every other metro daily in the U.S., the Tribune has weathered a difficult decade amid dropping print circulation and advertising revenues. From September 2006 to September 2014, the Tribune’s average daily circulation fell 17% from 211,775 to 176,225, according to the Alliance for Audited Media (previously the Audit Bureau of Circulations).

Former owner Media General sold the struggling newspaper to Tampa Media Group, funded by Revolution Capital Group, in 2012.

Before the latest sale, Tampa was one of the few remaining two-newspaper towns in the U.S. Other cities which lost their second newspapers include Denver, following the closure of the Rocky Mountain News in 2009, and Seattle, where the Post-Intelligencer also closed in 2009.