An invitation from the top editor.
Executive editor Mark J. Rochester invites readers to share their thoughts with the Herald-Tribune
David B. Lindsay, the founding publisher of the newspaper that evolved into the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, first set eyes on the nascent city of Sarasota from a World War I era biplane he flew from a military flight training field near Arcadia in 1917.
Then 18, Lindsay had been learning the newspaper business from his father, George D. Lindsay, the publisher and editor of the Chronicle and the Leader-Tribune in Marion, Indiana before the war.
Later when he was 29, Lindsay and his younger brother Dick, 21, returned in 1925 to open the Sarasota Herald – an afternoon paper – in a shop at 539 S. Orange Avenue.
That paper blossomed along with Sarasota County – which itself came to be in the summer of 1921 – and grew into the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, which now marks its 100th anniversary on Oct. 4..
Lindsay, an Army Air Corps lieutenant, returned home to Indiana after the war, worked for his father in the winter and performed in the summers with a group of barnstorming pilots.
By 1921, he’d saved enough money to buy the Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina.
Two years later, Lindsay returned to Florida and bought an interest in the St. Petersburg Times, which was owned by Paul Poynter, a friend from Indiana.
The two would later buy the Clearwater Sun..
“He used to fly over to Sarasota and land it on the beach and do what fighter pilots do and chase girls,” Lindsay’s grandson Bob Lindsay recalled.
Lindsay and his younger brother Dick, with the help of Poynter and E. E. Naugle established the Sarasota Herald, with their father George moving down from Indiana to be its first editor.
Dick Lindsay – an avid photographer – was in charge of advertising, sales and circulation and photography.
The year 1925 was a crucial one for Sarasota County.
Attorney J. J. Williams Jr. arrived in Sarasota County from Memphis, Tennessee – where his father was a two-term mayor – and founded the century-old Williams Parker Law Firm near the height of the Florida Land Boom.
The 32-bed Sarasota Hospital – which in the century since evolved into the Sarasota Memorial Health Care System – opened Nov. 2, 1925.
Construction also started on five bridges – which were paid for from a 1924 bond issue approved by county residents that also covered the construction of 15 roads – though the bridges were the main focus, in part to open up the barrier islands to development.
In 1926, SaraBay Country Club was established and the Sarasota Opera House was built and opened as the A.B. Edwards Theater.
Local author and historian Jeff LaHurd noted that the Sarasota Herald helped fuel the real estate boom.
“They came in at exactly the right time,” LaHurd said. “Full-page ads touting housing developments, apartments,”
Florida Gov. John Martin, dubbed the “good roads governor,” praised the growth and asserted that the sun will never set on Sarasota.
But the Great Recession started early in Florida, Lindsay said.
LaHurd said the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 was a major catalyst in the economic downturn.
“Things in the Depression were really tough, the Florida land boom busted in 1926,” Lindsay said, adding that the newspaper survived issuing local scrip and trading with the local community.
“The whole town on IOUs and barter.”
During that time, the Lindsays bought out their partners in the Sarasota Herald and sold off interests in the St. Petersburg Times.
Lindsay noted that the family sold off other holdings at that time, including about 1,500 acres on the southern portion of Longboat Key for $35 an acre. That land was eventually developed into Bay Isles.
In 1938, the Lindsays bought out the Sarasota Tribune, a morning daily that started four years earlier, and rechristened the merged paper the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
The economy in the area, Lindsay said, didn’t improve until after World War II.
Both David and Dick Lindsay paused their newspaper efforts to return to service in World War II. David ferried B-24 bombers to China and Nick, a Navy lieutenant, trained pilots in the U.S.
After the war Dick Lindsay returned to the family business in Marion, Indiana and David Lindsay concentrated on the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
When George Lindsay died in 1946, David Lindsay became editor and publisher of the Herald-Tribune though by 1948 David B. Lindsay Jr., then 25, moved from the family newspapers in Indiana to help publish the paper.
David B. Lindsay Jr. is credited with helping write the enabling legislation to create the Sarasota County Public Hospital District in 1949.
In a section of the 1975 edition of the Herald-Tribune dedicated to the hospital’s 50th anniversary, O.K. Fike, chairman of a committee that included Lindsay Jr. that was charged with charting the future of the hospital, was quoted as saying, “We worked all night in the old Herald-Tribune office at Little Five Points. We finished about 8 o’clock the next morning and sent the bill to Tallahassee.”
The father-son duo operated the paper – and the afternoon Sarasota Journal, which they started in 1952, until the older Lindsay retired in 1955.
Through his newspaper, David Lindsay Jr. also had one of the leading voices in Southwest Florida during its defining, post-World War II growth.
Bob Lindsay told the Herald-Tribune in 1990 that Sarasota County was a very dynamic place at that time.
“The population of Sarasota County doubled from 1960 to 1970 when it went from 60,000 to 120,000. And it almost doubled again in the decade after that. That was also the heyday of newspapers before the diversity of media that we have today. Newspapers were really the cutting edge of all political and community activity.”
His father and grandfather weren’t bashful about using their clout, either.
David Lindsay Sr.’s smoking-related lung and throat cancer prompted him and his son to ban cigarette advertisements in both the Herald-Tribune and the Journal in 1964.
David Lindsay Jr., an outdoorsman and hunter, also defended the environment against phosphate mining inland and commercial dredge-and-fill operations along Sarasota’s coastline.
“He was an ‘environmentalist’ long before the word became common, and he took on some very significant battles in those areas,” Lindsay said.
In 1969 the Lindsays moved the newspapers to a new facility on Bay Street, just south of where U.S. 41 and U.S. 301 merge.
Citing dwindling circulation, the Lindsays closed the Sarasota Journal on July 9, 1982.
Later that year, David B.Lindsay Jr. sold the paper to the New York Times Co. for an estimated $86 million.
“About the time we sold it, we were the largest private employer in the country,” with about 650 employees, Lindsay said.
The New York Times hired Judson Elven Grubbs – a career newspaperman who had been publisher of the Lakeland Ledger – as publisher of the Herald-Tribune, which was the crown jewel of the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group.
Grubbs had the task of modernizing presses and production facilities and starting the practice of printing two zoned editions in Sarasota County, as well as zoned editions in Manatee and Charlotte counties.
A new printing plant near the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport opened and allowed the paper to publish its first color photographs in 1984.
In Sarasota, Grubbs was involved in the community, especially the Ringling Museum, the United Way and the Senior Friendship Centers.
At the May 1988 dedication of the center at Luke Wood Park — virtually across U.S. 41 from the old Herald-Tribune building — Grubbs was honored for his leadership in fundraising for the $1.6 million complex.
Grubbs retired from Sarasota in 1991 and was succeeded by one of his protegees, Lynn Matthews – who later took over at the helm of NYTRENG in Atlanta.
Matthews was succeeded by another one of Grubbs’ protegees, Diane McFarlin.
A 1976 University of Florida graduate, McFarlin started her career as a reporter at the Sarasota Journal.
After rising to managing editor at the Herald-Tribune she applied, at Grubbs urging, for the job of executive editor at the Gainesville Sun in 1987.
Three years later she returned to Sarasota as the executive editor and became publisher in 1999 – a role she held until 2012, when she became Dean of the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida.
Former Herald-Tribune editorial page editor Tom Tryon, who got his start in 1981 as a police reporter in Manatee County, called the years under New York Times ownership the glory days.
“The Times resourced us well to do good journalism,” Tryon said.
As a police reporter, Tryon had to visit city police departments and the sheriff’s office to sort through written reports.
“The reporters were a real fixture in the community,” he said. “You couldn’t sit in your office and look stuff online – that was a big cultural shift.”
He moved to the Opinion pages in 1985 and two decades later became the head of the editorial department.
“People would introduce me as an editor at ‘our newspaper,’” he said. “That was very very common.
“There was a very strong relationship between the readership community and the paper for decades.”
McFarlin considered that strong relationship a crucial aspect not always available in the age of social media and 24-hour cable TV news.
“I think the greatest contribution to the community was the paper’s extensive coverage at the grass-roots level,” she said, citing the ability to have reporters present at government and school board meetings, live performances and community gatherings. “That’s something that’s being lost across the United States.”
At its height, the Herald-Tribune had the main office in Sarasota, as well a two bureaus each in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte Counties and put out two zoned editions in Manatee; three zoned editions in Sarasota; and a zoned edition for Charlotte County and for Englewood.
“All of this helped shape Sarasota into the community it is today,” McFarlin said. “We didn’t always get it right …but our intent was to hold the community to the highest standards because that’s clearly what the people who chose to live in Sarasota expected.”
In 1994, the Herald-Tribune partnered with WWSB to provide news to the community.
McFarlin said it was clear how television expanded the newspaper’s reach and video was a core competency that would become valuable as the World Wide Web grew.
But that partnership was short-lived, following the sale of the TV station to new owners.
Instead, the newspaper expanded on a concept started in 1993 by the Chicago Tribune, when it started Chicagoland Television.
But while Chicagoland Television had its own studio; the Herald-Tribune hosted SNN inside the newsroom.
“The Herald-Tribune always had an innovative spirit and SNN may be the most dramatic example of that,” McFarlin said.
SNN operated out of a studio created from a closet and a conference room in the old building to a large, dedicated studio when the Herald-Tribune moved to a new building in 2006.
While located in that building, reporter Paige St. John won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism in 2011 for her series on Florida’s insurance industry – under the auspices of then executive editor Mike Connelly.
Before that, the newspaper was twice a finalist for the prize.
“The Pulitzers are a particular point of pride,” said McFarlin, who noted the intense competition with largest news organizations in the United States.
The paper won its second in 2016, with Bill Church as executive editor and Pat Dorsey as publisher.
Leonora LaPeter Anton and Anthony Cormier, of the Tampa Bay Times, and Michael Braga, of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune won that year for a project on escalating violence and neglect in Florida mental hospitals.
Cormier started his work on that project while at the Herald-Tribune.
The transactions were accompanied by staff cutbacks, consolidation of printing facilities and the selloff of real estate – echoing the actions the Lindsays took to keep the paper viable during the Great Depression.
By then, the Herald-Tribune had been sold twice as diminishing revenues attributed everything from the rise of Craigslist to the Great Recession had sapped the financial strength of the paper.
In 2012, the New York Times sold its regional newspaper group to Halifax Media Holdings; and in 2015 New Media Investment Group and Gatehouse purchased Halifax.
A philanthropic legacy for the future
In 2019, New Media Investment Group Inc. acquired Gannett Co.
Since then, Gannett has been transitioning to a more vibrant online news presence, while still maintaining legacy newspapers.
In addition to the journalistic accomplishments the Herald-Tribune continues to make a sizeable mark in the region – including Charlotte, DeSoto, Manatee and Sarasota counties through Season of Sharing.
The altruistic fundraising effort got its start in 1999 when McFarlin was a member of the board of the Community Foundation of Sarasota County and was talking with the late Stewart Stearns, the foundation’s executive director about the red tape faced by families in immediate need to avoid homelessness.
“The human service agencies could not help them in a timely manner,” McFarlin said.
Those discussions brought forth Season of Sharing for the 2000 holiday season– patterned in part after the New York Times Neediest Cases Fund – with Herald-Tribune journalists sharing stories of those in need as part of a fundraising appeal.
“It has succeeded far beyond my wildest dreams and it underscores the extent of philanthropy of generosity in Sarasota,” McFarlin said.
“The other thing it demonstrates is how important partnerships can be,” she added. “Season Sharing started as a partnership between the Herald-Tribune, the Community Foundation of Sarasota County, the Manatee Community Foundation and about a dozen human service agencies.
“When that partnership was expanded to include other foundations and most notably the Patterson Foundation, as well as most local media, the amount just skyrocketed,” McFarlin said.
That first campaign raised $121,000.
“I was thrilled and thought this is fabulous,” McFarlin said.
In 2024 – a year in which many families were devastated by the 2024 hurricane season, 2,743 individual gifts that raised $7.2 million.
All told the effort has raised more than $50 million – with the Patterson Foundation $10.6 million since 2010 through a combination of gifts and funding matches – helping roughly 53,000 individuals and families.
“It has given me so much joy to watch the progress from afar,” McFarlin said. “What I love about Season of Sharing is that in addition to very well-heeled donors who can give a significant amount of money, it involves people who are givng $5, 10, $20.
“They’re giving as much as they can give and they’re getting that joy of knowing that they’re helping other people.”
Information from Herald-Tribune archives, including extensive stories written by Mark Zaloudek and the book “A Century of Caring, the history of Sarasota Memorial Hospital” was used in this story.
Earle Kimel primarily covers south Sarasota County as well as land development and environmental issues for the Herald-Tribune. Follow him on Facebook, and X. He can be reached by email at earle.kimel@heraldtribune.com. Support local journalism by subscribing.
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