- [Narrator] This is a production of WEDP PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(upbeat music) - Albert Einstein, the great theoretician once said, "A life lived for others is a life worthwhile."

The impact we have on other people's lives is often hard to measure, but there are certain folks who influence millions of people and have a lasting impact in our community.

Over the years, the "Suncoast Business Forum's" profiled a number of these business leaders.

Today, we revisit the profiles of two impactful individuals, who'll soon be retiring after decades leading important Tampa Bay organizations.

Their paths to success weren't always easy, and they weren't overnight.

They overcame major challenges along the way, including recessions, pandemics, and often brutal competition.

One navigated an award-winning daily newspaper through the changing landscape of online media, and the other helped develop Tampa Bay into a globally recognized performing arts destination.

We're proud to share their stories once again, as they wind down this chapter of their successful and impactful careers, next on the "Suncoast Business Forum."

- "Suncoast Business Forum," brought to you by the financial services firm of Raymond James, offering personalized wealth management advice and banking and capital markets expertise, all with a commitment to putting clients' financial wellbeing first.

more information is available at raymondjames.com.

(upbeat theme music) - President Abraham Lincoln once said, "In the end, it's not the years in your life that count, it's the life in your years.

Two Tampa Bay CEOs who are retiring this summer, have squeezed a lot of life into their decades long careers.

As they prepare to exit the spotlight, we remember their years of accomplishments.

First meet Paul Tash, who we profiled in September of 2013.

He's retiring as a CEO of the Tampa Bay Times in St. Petersburg.

Before migrating to sunny St. Pete 44 years ago, he spent his formative years in Indiana.

- My parents were school teachers in South Bend, and I was the first of two brothers born there.

And it was a very prototypical Midwestern upbringing, you know?

My brother and I would go shovel the snow off the driveway so that we could shoot hoops in the wintertime when we were driving our parents crazy inside.

My brother and I were both Eagle Scouts in South Bend.

Keith was a little more athletically inclined than I was, which meant he was good enough to play on the school teams.

I trended more toward the journalism and the band stuff.

But it was a great upbringing.

- You were involved in journalism in junior high school, as well as high school.

Tell us about those two papers, and whether you think being focused on journalism helped you academically.

- Oh, the junior high school newspaper was James Monroe Junior High School in South Bend, Indiana.

And so its name was the Monroe Doctrine.

And when I got to a high school, it was Andrew Jackson High School in South Bend.

And so there's a historic theme in naming here, so its name was the "Old Hickory."

It was a weekly newspaper, which is a lot for high school kids to publish, but it was a weekly newspaper.

And so I got involved then, and one thing led to another and that carried me off toward IU in a study in journalism and political science there.

- Following graduation from IU in 1976, you did graduate studies abroad.

Tell us about that.

- I had done journalism and politics as an undergrad.

I was encouraged by some of my professors at Indiana to apply for this.

So I did.

And one thing led to another, and got this scholarship and did a law degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

And I would say it was terrifically valuable, both as an academic exercise, but also as a way to help understand my own country a little better.

- After 30 years as CEO, Judy Lisi is retiring from Tampa Straz Center for the Performing Arts.

We profiled Judy in August, 2016.

- I was very, very lucky.

I grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut to a talented Italian family.

Everybody played an instrument, and we all got together once a week.

And my instruments were piano and flute.

My brother was clarinet.

My uncles were guitar and mandolin.

And we just all made music together.

My grandfather loved opera, which is, I think where I got my love of opera.

And we were very involved in the church theatricals, and my mother sang in the choir.

I remember being by her knee from when I was five years old.

So for me, the arts just always were.

It was just what we did.

I never separated them.

And both my brother and sister are also artists in the visual arts.

And my brother's a sculptor.

My sister's a painter.

They're both musicians.

I was an artist.

So, that's how it happened.

- I mean, did it seem obvious that when you were growing up, that all of you might end up in the arts?

- Not really.

But I think we were allowed to follow our passion, and we did that.

At one point, my father became very sick with emphysema and he had to stop working, and my mother was extraordinary.

She just kept the whole family going.

She worked during the day.

She made slip covers.

And she'd shop for the family, and we'd have a dinner together every night, including she took care of her mother and her bachelor uncle.

And then after dinner, she would go into the basement and sew and sew and sew.

Never complained, but had so much energy.

And she just, that's how we grew up.

You know, we didn't have a lot, but we knew we had to do.

That's what we learned from her.

You just do.

- [Geoffrey] In 1978, Paul Tash came to work for the St. Petersburg Times as a reporter.

- I still think of myself as a reporter, even though I do very little of it anymore.

And my colleagues in the newsroom would smile at the thought that I think of myself as a reporter, but I still think of myself as a reporter.

I covered mostly government and politics for those early years.

The chance to make a difference, the chance to be interested in a lot of things, the chance to write and be curious, it was just a terrific combination of opportunities.

- At the age of 28, you became the City Editor of the St. Petersburg Times.

That's very young.

- It's preposterous.

I mean, who would trust me at 28 with the responsibility of being the City Editor of the St. Pete times?

But that it's one of the things that kept me around is that Gene, and it was always a place of- - [Geoffrey] Is this Gene?

- [Paul] Gene Patterson, who was then the CEO and chairman, and Andy Barnes, who would succeed him.

It was always a place of possibility for young people.

And if you did well with opportunities, you got to have some other ones.

I actually got that job because the guy they offered it to first turned it down.

And I was plan B for the City Editor's job, but it worked out well for me, and I didn't even know that for a while.

- [Geoffrey] Judy Lisi studied to become a nun and lived in a convent after high school.

- I just loved the nuns because I just had great ones, and I just emulated them.

And you know, and this is in the early 60s, and women didn't have a lot of options.

I was from a very conservative Catholic family, and I wanted to be educated.

And I was full of idealism of how I was gonna save the world, as young people are.

And so, to call it that God called you to this.

And I thought I was called to it.

And so I was there for almost three years, but I have to say I learned so much because you learn intellectual exercise, which I don't think people always realize about the convent.

We had very high level of education there, and they were really part of the real world because they were dealing in communities that had real issues, and they would get into the poor neighborhoods and try to make things better and serve people.

- [Geoffrey] Judy later went to graduate school in Missouri and Minnesota, and returned to Connecticut with a doctoral degree in theater.

- I was teaching at Sacred Heart University.

I went back there to teach theater and speech.

And then there was a company starting up in downtown Bridgeport called the Downtown Cabaret Theater.

And it was really a terrific place.

We got great reviews.

New York Times loved us.

They would always come up.

They thought we were really spectacular.

And it was a great place to have a family, and do that 'cause I didn't have to tour.

I loved performing.

I just loved it.

It was great fun, but I was more interested in the marketing.

I was interested in getting grants.

I learned about board development.

I learned about audience development.

I learned about fundraising.

I learned about working with the government, because that was also similar to us, was owned by the city.

- In 1983, you joined the Shubert Performing Arts Center in New Haven, Connecticut.

You joined as a marketing director, right?

- Yes.

It had just reopened.

It was this centerpiece of revitalization of downtown New Haven.

And it was right across the street from the Yale campus.

And they had just been open for six months.

They had hired and fired one person.

They had hired another person, and that person hired me to head up marketing and development.

And in three weeks he was fired, and the board asked me if I would step in as acting Executive Director, and it was a total surprise.

I was not prepared for it.

I had to go into Broadway and meet all the Broadway producers, all the people who had touring shows, because that was something I really didn't know at that point.

This is 1984.

But I did and I had so many people take me under their wing and really help me.

And I was also on the Governing Board of The Broadway League.

I didn't know why, but it was because of the fact that I was leading the Shubert, and I met all of these major people in that field.

- [Geoffrey] When Judy came to Tampa in the early 1990s, she took over a newly built performing arts center.

Its founders had a vision that one day Tampa Bay would become an important leader in the performing arts.

- The interesting thing about the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center is that when it opened, it was on every cover of any professional journal in the world because it made such an impact.

Really, nobody knew where Tampa was, but when we saw what a Tampa had done, it was very, very impressive.

So I came down and I thought, "Boy, this place is fabulous."

I couldn't believe what they had built here in Tampa.

And when you show somebody like me a carte blanche of state of the art facilities, and all it needed was the right programming mix, the right marketing, the right development, bring together a team of people.

Cuz I looked at Tampa and I thought, "My gosh, this is a great city.

This is a city that's really, I think really going to merge over time."

And I went back to my husband , and I said, "I didn't expect to be blown away by this."

And we had great visionaries here in Tampa who recognized that they wanted to put a stake in the ground of culture, and they wanted to transform Tampa.

So we are really living the legacy.

- [Geoffrey] Paul benefited greatly from working for the paper's legendary editors and publishers.

The paper's commitment to quality journalism had been enshrined by the papers founding family member, Nelson Poynter.

- There was a guy named Nelson Poynter.

Mr. Poynter was a Hoosier from Southern Indiana.

His family had purchased the Times now more than 100 years ago.

And Mr. Poynter looked ahead to his own mortality, and he wanted to keep the Times independent and locally held.

He didn't much believe in chains as owners of newspapers.

And he thought that that newspapers needed to be rooted in their own communities.

So he did something remarkable.

He gave it away upon his death.

Mr. Poynter had a wife.

He had two daughters.

He provided for them in other ways, but he created a school then called the Modern Media Institute that could inherit the newspaper and keep it private and locally held.

And then he handed off control of the organization to his successor, who picked his successor, who picked his successor.

And I'm the third in that line.

- [Geoffrey] Success does not come without its trials and tribulations.

Judy had the vision to turn challenges into major achievements.

- It was easy to turn the center around, but then we had a big opportunity.

What can we build here?

How can we make this great for this community?

And so we just dedicated ourselves to it, and bit by bit it just grew and grew and grew.

The opera company, we produced a lot of shows in the Jaeb theater.

We started a couple little theater companies.

We started the conservatory.

Really, we had a lot of education programs through the 90s, but they were in wig rooms and in lobbies and dressing rooms.

We just ran out of space.

So in 1999, we went to the board and said, "We're really out of room for these."

And again, having a great board and great chairman all the way through, they said, "What do you need?"

And we said, "Well, we need to create proper spaces for this."

And they committed to a capital campaign, a $30 million campaign.

And we opened it in 2004.

And we were fortunate to have generous, generous donors, including the Doctors Patel who were extraordinary, but many, many donors for that.

I think it's been a wonderful success, but with that, we just have to keep up with the success.

- [Geoffrey] In the early 2000s, technology and the internet caused serious upheaval among traditional news media.

Despite major challenges, Paul developed a strategy to continue publishing this important daily local newspaper.

- The greatest challenge of the business operations then was the outfall with the fallout from the attacks of 9/11.

September 11th, which sent the economy, Florida, the country, into a sharp, but relatively short tail spin.

And we thought that was a tough period.

And we came through it, and everybody thought that sailing would be smooth again after that.

And little did we know that that would look like a day at the beach compared to what would start in 2006, 2007.

- How do you strategize for the Times Publishing Company and the Tampa Bay Times in an environment that's continually changing and becoming more competitive?

- Well, I think there are two things going on, Geoff, but they both have to do primarily with advertising.

The first is that we have been through this punishing recession over the last several years, which has also taken a huge toll on our constituent advertisers.

I read the other day in our pages that the average household income in Florida is now still 10% lower than what it had been before the recession started.

That explains a lot about how the economy still feels here.

And so, you know, we feel the pain of our advertisers.

The second thing as you point out is that there are lots and lots of ways that advertisers are trying to connect with their customers.

And so the competition there is also very fierce, and we are part of that competition.

We have very robust presence, electronically.

Tampabay.com, our website, is the dominant news and information site among all the local sites.

It's just that the competition for advertising dollars there is also very robust.

So how do we address this?

Well, first I think we increasingly are trying to make sure that we're getting every possible member of the audience, every possible reader and advertiser at the Tampa Bay Times.

And indeed our name change reflected our success in growing the Times to include the entire Tampa Bay region rather than just one part of it.

And that's primarily in our print newspaper.

We launched a free daily called "TBT."

Again, part of our ability, part of our effort to really succeed at capturing as many readers and advertisers as possible.

And then meanwhile, we continue to develop a very robust presence electronically on tampabay.com.

It's a necessity.

If we don't experiment, we'll suffer the consequences of that failure.

- You've also begun some special strategic relationships with other news organizations.

- We have, indeed.

I would say probably the most prominent one is our Tallahassee bureau, which we've merged with the Miami Herald.

When I was a reporter in Tallahassee, we used to compete back and forth with each other.

And now, I think partly in deference to the economic times, we've combined our bureaus, and we might not have done it, but for the challenge ,the financial challenge.

But in fact, it's been a very good thing journalistically, because it means we have more people covering more different kinds of things, rather than duplicating each other's efforts.

The other great thing about it is that it provides a very strong audience for our work in Southeast Florida, and a strong audience for the Herald's work in West Central, Florida.

- [Geoffrey] As the publisher of the Times and Chairman of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, Paul expanded the Institute's role as a center for best practices and excellence in journalism.

- The Poynter Institute has two principle roles.

The first as we've discussed earlier is as the owner of the Times Publishing Company and the Tampa Bay Times.

And I think that's an enormously important role sometimes overlooked, a little bit taken for granted, in the Tampa Bay area.

But the strength strength of the Times really turns a lot on its ownership by the Poynter Institute.

But the other one is to really try to lift the standards and the practice of American journalism.

The Poynter Institute is engaged in teaching both in St. Petersburg, it's involved in teaching at news organizations around the country at their own places.

It has a very robust online.

It was one of the pioneers in terms of online learning with a series of course offerings called "News U."

It runs conferences and seminars on journalism.

It's a gathering place in the Tampa Bay area.

In some ways the Poynter Institute is at least as well known outside the Tampa Bay area for its work as inside.

- [Geoffrey] Over the years, the Straz Center's become a role model for other performing arts venues.

- The thing about the conservatory is we have so many other performing arts centers around the country now that are coming to see how we did this.

And they're designing conservatories for themselves.

Kennedy Center's doing one.

Now the Broward Center just added some space.

The center in Omaha is doing one.

So I think perhaps I'm hoping we started another movement, because arts education, it's not that all these kids are gonna become artists.

They're not.

But the skills they are going to learn, they're gonna be able to transfer to everything they do, whether it's practice, practice, practice, whether it is exercising their creativity and imagination, their confidence to be able to go up and present themselves, their team building, because you can't do the performing arts by yourself.

You always have to connect your responsibility to your other cast members.

Whatever you do, it helps expand these kids' understanding of who they are and their capabilities, and that they're gonna be able to take these no matter where they go.

- [Geoffrey] Managing institutions that reach millions of people requires the ability to anticipate and navigate major challenges.

Both Judy Lisi and Paul Tash are optimistic about the future for the Times and the Straz Center.

- The pace is unfolding so rapidly, that it's a little hard to anticipate, but if I were betting on any one thing right now, I would continue to bet on the tablet, which gets more and more robust and has such capacity for video, audio, text, that I am thinking a lot about mobile.

You know, one of the things everybody talks about the great competition to newspapers from the internet.

The other thing, though, it creates some terrific possibilities for newspapers as well.

I no longer have to have an FCC license to be in the video news business or the audio news business.

The more our kids turn to the internet as a distribution pipeline, the less important those legacy television franchises will become.

And so that puts a squarely in competition in some places where you used to have to have a government license to play.

- After this arts center opened in 1987, every major city in Florida wanted to have their own performing arts center.

So the Arsht Center in Miami, which only has two theaters, remember we have three, they opened a number of years ago, about 10 years ago, and theirs was a half a billion dollars.

The Phillips Center that just opened in Orlando last year was like $600 million with only two theaters.

So we really got a bargain here, and it's been serving this community for 30 years.

So that's why I think we've proven ourselves.

I really think it's time to take this precious asset that we have, and make sure we create it for the next generation.

We need to be the visionaries now and stewards of the future.

And to that end, we did a huge needs assessment.

We're also looking at what major performing arts centers are doing around the world.

And they're not just about ticketed venues.

They're really about gathering places for the community.

So we got a very nice grant from the Duckwall Foundation last year to conduct a master planning study, which we did.

And we have a great concept for the future.

And I think it will keep the Performing Arts Center state of the art, and a true international cultural destination for Tampa.

- Although retirement is usually the end of one's career, with both Judy Lisi and Paul Tash, it's more likely a transition to what's next, or as PBS's own Fred Rogers of "Mr. Rogers Neighborhood" says, "Often when we think you're at the end of something, you're really at the beginning of something else."

If you like to see this program again, or any of the CEO profiles in our "Suncoast Business Forum" archive, you can find them on the web at wedu.org/sbf.

Thanks for joining us for the "Suncoast Business Forum."

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