The Palm Beach Post’s local columnist for more than 30 years, Frank Cerabino, is leaving the paper in early September, joining other key staffers in accepting a buyout that will reduce the paper’s newsroom by more than 10 percent.
The buyouts prompted by cost-cutting from the paper’s Gannett headquarters eliminate the paper’s most popular and controversial voice and cut deeply into its already reduced institutional memory.
For Cerabino, whose often satirical columns date to 1991, the offer came at an opportune time: He recently turned 70.
Recalling how he would mercilessly go after public officials who said they were resigning to spend more time with their family, he conceded that now he is one of those people. But, he pointed out, unlike those he lampooned, he’s not in his 40s.
“Seventy is a number that gets your attention,” he said in an interview with Stet News. “When you hit 70, you’re not fooling anybody.”
Editor’s note: Check back next week for the rest of Stet’s conversation with Frank Cerabino.
Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, announced plans last month to cut $100 million as second-quarter revenues declined to $585 million.
The company gave employees less than a week, later extended to two weeks for union workers, to accept a $1,500 bonus to leave, plus one week’s pay for every year worked, up to 28 years for most employees.
Others deciding to leave, Stet News has confirmed: The Post’s interim opinion page editor and former executive editor, Rick Christie; the Palm Beach Daily News’ executive editor, Carol Rose; longtime investigations editor, Holly Baltz; and two part-timers.
Four of the six, including Cerabino, started working at The Post in the 1980s.
In all, more than 10 percent of the combined newsrooms of The Post and Shiny Sheet accepted a buyout.
It leaves The Post newsroom with about 30 editors, reporters, photographers and production workers, including sports and features. The newsroom topped 300 employees in 2008.
“These continued cuts to local newspapers are detrimental to local communities,” said Brian Crowley, a former Post reporter who took a buyout in 2008 after 28 years. “They’re people with years and years of experience in Palm Beach County. You lose a depth of knowledge that can be critical in ongoing reporting about what happens in county and local governments.
“Gannett is doing a lot of harm to The Post and the readers.”
Love him or hate him
“You can’t think about The Palm Beach Post without thinking of Frank Cerabino,” said longtime Post senior editor Jan Tuckwood, who left in 2020.
When the paper conducted reader research in 2018, she said, Cerabino was by far the best-known personality in the operation.
Cerabino, the columnist readers either hate or love, was known as much for his clear writing and well-documented story-telling as his acerbic wit. He took on many reporting assignments over the years, including telling The Post’s own story in 2016 when it turned 100.
Among issues the newspaper’s remaining managers will have to resolve is how to run the Daily News, also known as the Shiny Sheet, without its top editor. The newspaper for Palm Beach society, which publishes seven days a week except in summer, emerges from the buyouts with five reporters, two photographers and an assistant editor but no executive editor.
The terms of the buyouts call for the jobs of those accepted into the program to be eliminated and no new hiring to be allowed, workers at the newspapers said.
Surprising and creative
Rose, who joined The Post in 1998, took over leadership of the Daily News in 2019. She referred all questions to Gannett, which refused to comment.
Tuckwood remembered the day Rose introduced herself as the newly appointed Palm Beach Daily News editor at a packed breakfast meeting at The Breakers resort.
Rose, who was born in Jamaica, told the audience that, “I come from an island, too.”
“I thought about that breakfast and how historic that was when you think the Shiny Sheet was founded in 1897 as a Gilded Age newspaper,” Tuckwood said Thursday.
Rose’s greatest strength is her ability to stay calm and confident and still be surprising and creative, Tuckwood said. “That’s a big deal.”
Of Rose’s and Cerabino’s impact on the community, Tuckwood said, “It’s their voices that deliver the news.”
Statewide opinion leader, investigations editor
Gannett took over The Post in 2019 after it was bought by Gatehouse Media in a deal worth $1.4 billion.
A year earlier, Gatehouse bought The Post and Shiny Sheet for $49 million from its longtime owner, Cox Enterprises.
Christie, who started with The Post in the 1980s, served as editorial page editor and executive editor before moving to a Gannett job as statewide opinions editor in December. He returned to The Post as interim opinion editor after the February firing of Tony Doris, who was removed after he approved an editorial cartoon critical of Israel’s war in Gaza.
The Post no longer publishes editorial cartoons.
Christie’s departure leaves a single editorial writer, Doug Lyons, who has been at The Post since 2021. Previously, he spent 21 years at the Sun-Sentinel, including about 10 years as an editorial writer.
In 2008, The Post had seven editorial writers covering an area from Boca Raton to Fort Pierce.
Baltz started work at The Post in 1987 before leaving for four years and returning in 2008, where she took on newsroom management duties before transitioning to investigations editor.
She led investigations into heroin’s death toll in Palm Beach County, a judge’s ties to unethical guardianship practices and the “first failure” in efforts to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein. She oversaw the paper’s efforts to unseal 2006 grand jury testimony in the Epstein case, which took five years and garnered several journalism awards, including a Green Eyeshade.
She also headed the newspaper’s 2021 investigation into sugar cane-burning, “Black Snow,” a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, before the paper disbanded its investigative team in January.
Greg Stepanich, a part-timer who worked as weekend editor for The Post and copy editor for the Daily News, is taking a buyout for the second time. He worked at the newspaper for 25 years, at one time driving business coverage as an assistant business editor, over two terms starting in 1998. He took a buyout in 2008 before returning.
The buyout is well-timed for Stepanich: He just started his first year as a full-time professor at the Conservatory of Music at Lynn University. The Palm Beach Arts Paper, which Stepanich founded in 2008, will continue, he said.
Lou Ann Frala, a part-time sports copy editor, took the buyout, her second in five years. She left The Post after 35 years in December 2020 but returned in a part-time role in 2022.
Editor’s note: The authors of this story, Joel Engelhardt and Carolyn DiPaolo, worked at The Post until 2020.
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.
