Tampa Bay Times journalist Lauren Peace is a fan of her local bookshop, Book and Bottle, a “bookstore with wine and a wine shop with books” (and coffee!). At one of the store’s book club events, Peace had a lightbulb moment. “The business is packed, and people across all demographics are sitting there in conversation,” she recalled. “I’m like, ‘wow, wouldn’t it be great if we could apply this model to news?’”
Starting last month, the Tampa Bay Times partnered with Book and Bottle to offer monthly “article clubs” in the St. Pete store on Sunday evenings. Peace, an enterprise equity reporter, moderates conversations about a Tampa Bay Times story among its author and community members. The idea is not just to discuss the story’s substance, but to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at the reporting process and decision-making that shape the published article.
Peace sees the club as an opportunity to demystify how reporting works and bring people together to talk about local issues, “with the hope of ultimately hooking people who are already readers” — and who already have some habit of paying for writing. She wants to figure out how to translate the “buy local” enthusiasm and loyalty people feel for the bookstore to their local newspaper. The events are free to attend, but “hopefully, we’ll convert some people [to subscribe to the Tampa Bay Times] in the process.”
For the first conversation in January, Peace brought in enterprise culture reporter Christopher Spata to discuss his story, “Home inseminations and gray market sperm: Florida Supreme Court case meets DIY fertility,” published last November. Peace picks stories at least a month in advance so prospective attendees have time to read them, which means stories need to have the right balance of evergreen relevance and timeliness to work for a conversation some time after publication. Peace was drawn to this story because it had a clear news peg — a few weeks before the Jan. 18 article club, the Florida Supreme Court ruled on the case discussed in the story, finding that at-home sperm donors can become legal parents — but was also “a story you couldn’t put down,” she said, written with an eye for craft and narrative. “It was fascinating; it made lots of people go, wait, what?! I’ve never thought about that before.”
The Tampa Bay Times, which has a paywall, put print copies of the story near Book and Bottle’s register and began advertising the first article club five days in advance. The first event drew around 15 people, some of whom came for the conversation and some who wandered into the store at the right time.
Peace loosened up the group with an icebreaker that doubled as a sort of informal listening session — “What is news to you?” She estimated around half of attendees were already news consumers and subscribers, and half weren’t. Peace had prepared questions for Spata, but found the key was to strike the balance between interviewing her colleague and offering prompts for the group. One participant brought her child, conceived through sperm donation, and another was considering sperm donation but saw the price as a barrier. Those more personal threads led to a discussion of the reporting process, and Spata ultimately shared “kind of a notebook dump,” Peace said, getting into what made it into the story and what was left out.
The second article club took place the weekend of Valentine’s Day. Peace brought in energy reporter Emily Mahoney, one of the reporters of the investigation “Undocumented workers built Florida’s roads — and died in the process,” published last October. This time, the event was advertised a full month in advance, including in a newsletter for Times subscribers. It drew a higher turnout that included new and repeat attendees, around 30 people — enough to pack the small store. That mix included people “who already care deeply about the work that we do, interacting with people who are maybe newer to it,” Peace said. (She added that both events so far have attracted community members across a wide age range, from college kids to retirees.) For this discussion, “people came with questions,” Peace said. “They had really thought about the mechanics of the reporting for this piece.”
Showing off the breadth of the newspaper’s work is one of Peace’s goals for the article club. “What we really want is range,” she said. “Part of my goal with this is to put on display that journalism, and especially the journalism that we produce, is so expansive in what it looks like, how it’s reported, how it’s written, what it accomplishes.” In March, near the height of the local Michelin season, Peace plans to feature the Tampa Bay Times’ team of food reporters (the Food Hub).
Peace emphasized that this event is a low-lift experiment that she’ll refine through trial and error, and credited the Times and her editor for being willing to let her run with an idea without wrapping it in red tape. She pitched the article club last fall, after hosting a more formal panel discussion at Book and Bottle about her reporting on domestic violence. “I’m kind of making this up as I go,” she said. For instance, while she’d considered moderating discussions of both local and national news, she’s seen enough early success with the former that she’s leaning toward sticking to a local focus. And no money changes hands between the bookstore and the newspaper; the Times simply uses Book and Bottle’s space for the monthly event.
The Tampa Bay Times does plenty of events “that take a lot of time and preparation and are resource-intensive…this is not that, and not everything has to be that,” Peace said. She encouraged other newsrooms to embrace that spirit of quick-turn experimentation.
“Media organizations have already relied on their readers coming to them,” Peace said. “There’s been this idea of, like, ‘we are the beacons of information and truth and the readers will come,’ and that’s just so no longer the case.” She sees events like the article club as one way to get out in front of potential audiences and show them what journalism is, and why it matters.
“If we want to continue to exist, and to do the important work that we do every day, we have to justify our existence to the people in our communities,” she added. “We have to get better at telling our own story and breaking down the walls between ‘institution on the hill’ and who we really are.”
Photo of the Tampa Bay Times February article club at Book and Bottle courtesy of Lauren Peace. Attendees are pictured discussing opening ice breakers in small groups ahead of the broader conversation.
