TAMPA, Fla. — Next month will mark 80 years that one local newspaper has been in circulation.
C. Blythe Andrews III is the President of The Florida Sentinel Bulletin. The paper was founded by his grandparents.
"They started the paper in Jacksonville, and unfortunately, during that time, they had to pack up because they received word that they were coming to the Ku Klux Klan was coming to burn the house down and all that kind of stuff to run them out of Jacksonville," he said.
The family resettled in Tampa in 1945.
"2025 does not compare nowhere near 1945 and what they had to go through, and your mother and father had to go through, to what, really what, what we going through," he said.
Today, the biweekly paper's circulation is about 14,000.
"We base our paper on giving you the truth, no matter what it is, we don't speculate. We don't have our opinion on if something happened," Andrews III, who goes by Drew, said.
You can find the paper on stands at Circle K's, Wal-Mart's, Wawa's, Publix's and more across Tampa Bay. You can also find it online.
"What we have here is that people get their information now on the phone, and it's not really, you know, we have to stay relevant to that point of giving them what they want," he added.
General Manager Terry Clark plays a big role in bringing those stories to devices everywhere.
"I love the job. I look forward to coming to work," Clark said.
At this family-owned company, every single employee is an extension of the family. Clark says their goal is to make the readers sense that too.
"It's a privilege to be able to do that, you know, provide for our community, but our role is educate the people about what's happening," he said.
The Sentinel has a deep connection to this community, from the context and stories for a community often overlooked to all of the doors it has opened for people in this neighborhood.
This paper is where Fred Hearn's career started.
"I read the newspaper, of course, the Tampa Tribune, which didn't have much news about black people, and usually when they did, it was something negative. But the Florida Sentinel covered every aspect of our lives," he recalled.
Hearns grew up on the same street as the owners of the paper.
"I asked Mr. Andrews one day when he was coming home from work, if I could work for the Florida Sentinel as a sports writer. And he said, 'Well, let me think about it. I'll get back with you.' And a couple of months later, he did just that," Hearns recalled.
Hearns got a shot, starting off by going to local Blake and Middleton High School football games and basketball games. The next summer, he was hired full-time.
"That's actually how I paid my way through USF undergrad school with the money I earned during the summer working for the Florida Sentinel Bulletin," he said. "$60 a week? That was a lot of money."
Now, Hearns only writes occasionally. He's the Tampa Bay History Center's Curator of Black History.
"The Florida Sentinel Bulletin sort of trained me, my experiences there, to be inquisitive, to ask questions and then follow up questions to the answers that you get, because usually you're not going to get all of the story from one interview," he said.
If you ask Drew if he's proud to be the latest Andrews family member holding the reins, he'll tell you.
"Proud? I wouldn't use the word proud. I would say honor, blessed. I'm honored or blessed to even have somewhere to come and say, 'this is ours'," he said.
Hillsborough County named a library after C. Blythe Andrews Jr., Drew's father.
The C. Blythe Andrews, Jr. Public Library is named after Drew's father. The library has a collection of papers dating back to original prints from the 1940s.
The library has also digitized it.
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