The First Amendment Foundation honors Paul Hogan, longtime First Amendment Foundation supporter & Tampa Tribune Editor with the Paul Hogan Memorial Campaign. Hogan was known as an “old-school newsman who championed journalistic crusading, opening government to the people, and defending his reporters against outside pressure.”
Photo: Tampa Bay Times. Paul Hogan, former managing editor of The Tampa Tribune. A colleague said of Hogan, “If anybody was trying to keep anything out of the paper he would fight to get it in.
Hogan was the 1st ME [Managing Editor] I worked for as a young media lawyer. What a privilege. Hogan’s holding court at heaven’s Chatterbox. I’ll never forget him. – Carol LoCicero, Thomas & LoCicero
In honor of Paul Hogan, the former Tampa Tribune Managing Editor who was a staunch defender of the First Amendment. – Patti Breckenridge
Former Tampa Tribune Managing Editor A. Paul Hogan, 83, died November 13, 2016. Paul “shepherded [the] Tampa Tribune into modern area.”
Mr. Hogan was born in Canton, Georgia, and was a newspaper reporter, writer and editor all his life. During a time when real ink was used to print newspapers, it might have been said that Mr. Hogan had the stuff in his blood.
Paul Hogan, according to a buddy, was a master at getting friends to buy him a beer.
And he had a lot of friends, from governors and business executives to the copy girl he hired out of college and used to send out for coffee — Sandy Freedman, later known as Mayor Freedman.
The beers were bought after deadline at the Chatterbox on S Howard Avenue where Mr. Hogan held court in a corner, or the Paddock, a dive where politicians, lawyers and other downtown wildlife mingled with reporters across from the old Kennedy Boulevard home of The Tampa Tribune.
Now Mr. Hogan — an old-school newsman who championed journalistic crusading, opening government to the people, and defending his reporters against outside pressure — is gone, too.
Mr. Hogan steered the Tampa Tribune through good times and bad, including the transition from manual typewriters to desktop computers, a change that wasn’t always easy for the older reporters and editors.
Paul Hogan/Photo courtesy Andy Smith
Mr. Hogan also led The Tribune through perhaps its most difficult period, when the Tampa Bay Times, then the St. Petersburg Times, made the move to increase its presence in Tampa and Hillsborough County, abandoning what had been a hands-off policy of years past for an aggressive approach that eventually led to The Times buying The Tribune outright. Before and during that time, Hogan fought a pitched battle, sometimes with forces within the company itself, whose policies he did not believe in.
But Mr. Hogan never gave up the fight, even when out-of-town corporate leaders made things virtually impossible for The Tribune to continue being the strong political force it had been for years.
Those who worked with Hogan every day, his reporters, editors, photographers, and artists knew him to be an aggressive newsman who wanted to get the story, but also a compassionate human being, whose realized the staff was made up of human beings with families.
‘God created Hogan to be a newspaper man. He had three passions: his family, The Tribune and Tampa,’ said Paul Catoe, a long-time friend.
Mr. Hogan never hesitated to go to bat for his people. He fought a constant battle with the upper management over money for salaries and other resources so that he could keep The Tribune competitive with other Florida newspapers, especially The St. Petersburg Times, a battle he did not always win.
Mr. Hogan was always quick to use his Southern charm and wit. Richard Urban, who managed the East Hillsborough and other suburban editions of The Tribune for years, remembered that after leaving The Tribune, a person from another newspaper called Mr. Hogan and asked if Urban had any bad habits, to which Mr. Hogan replied in his characteristic Southern drawl, “Well, he’s been known to take a drink from time to time.”
…Mr. Hogan was a sports writer for the Columbus Enquirer from 1951-1956 and covered politics for the Birmingham News from 1956-1960, where he reported on the civil rights movement. From 1960 to 1987 he worked at The Tribune, the last 13 years as managing editor. He was twice chairman of Leadership Tampa, a program of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce.In 1997 he was inducted into the Florida Freedom of Information Hall of Fame, and he was twice president of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. He served as a deacon at the First Baptist Church of Tampa.”
