from staff
Former Florida Times-Union Publisher Carl Cannon stepped down from the position in late 2007 after four decades in journalism and retired the next year, but was soon drafted to revive Touchdown Jacksonville, the organization that helped convince the National Football League to award the area a football franchise. Cannon led the successful effort in 1993 and was brought back in 2009 to sell enough season tickets to lift blackouts of Jacksonville Jaguars games, working with former Jaguar Tony Boselli as Team Teal commissioner. In addition to his nonprofit leadership, including a 2008-09 stint as president of the Rotary Club of Jacksonville, he also runs a boat business, Atlantic Coast Marine, with his son. He met last week with the Daily Record editorial staff.
How will the Jacksonville Jaguars’ 8-8 season affect ticket sales next year?
I would like to think it will not affect it. I think all of us would have preferred that they finished better, and had a winning season, and made it to the playoffs, and it just didn’t happen. Regardless of that, we still need to support the team. We’re certainly no worse than the years before, and in some ways much better. I think we had probably four of the best games I’ve seen in the last 10 years this year. I think the people who bought their tickets last year that had not been before really got their money’s worth.
Will you lead the ticket sales effort again this year?
Yes. They asked me if I would try to keep going and Tony Boselli has taken on a major, major part of that. It worked well last year, so we’re going to try to continue to do what we can.
The Jaguar ticket situation is still a very, very hot item to be dealt with, and if we backslide by 10,000 seats this year, it would be a horrible thing. We only have so much time.
It is very, very important that we maintain that momentum. We’ve got to hold onto what we’ve got. Maybe we just hold for another year, and then grow after we do well next year.
Is Boselli going to take a bigger role than he did last year?
No, it can’t be any bigger, but he’ll do the same thing. We kind of created all this out of thin air, from the time that the mayor said ‘we need help.’ One of the first people we went to was Tony. He was ready to do it and he continues to be.
How many presentations did he make?
He probably made 70 or 80 appearances, all the way from Brunswick to Palatka to St. Johns County and everywhere in between. We didn’t know how many tickets we could sell. The idea was just to try to broaden the base as much as we could, and we did really well early on out in Clay County. That gave us some enthusiasm. It obviously worked over time.
We just kind of laid it out, much like we did in 1995, when we asked everybody representing the media, especially the owners, to do whatever they could to promote it. I gave up 10 pages over 10 days, and asked them to do it in-kind, and that helped.
We did the same thing this time. We really didn’t have any big sources of money, so we had to get it where we could. The media really, really responded. It’s been estimated that we got more than a half million dollars’ worth of free promotion or ads. That was a major part of the success. It just grew. As a result, we did almost 16,000 tickets.
You were such an integral part of Touchdown Jacksonville, then 15 or so years later, again. Did you just take a blueprint? Or were there differences?
There wasn’t any blueprint because the first time there was no plan either. That was 10 days to sell 10,000 seats, and it was very comparable, as it turned out, because it is totally grass roots.
At that time, we called a big meeting of representatives from every type of business that we could think of. We had 40 or 50 people there, and we asked them to go out and spread out into the community. At the same time, the media were helping keep it a live story for that period of time.
It was more difficult this time because it was not such a defined period. It wasn’t 10 days. It was nine months to a year. But it worked the same way.
Had we gotten a renewal of all the tickets when we were 8-5, with the prospects of where we were headed, we would have probably gotten a terrific renewal. We’ve just got to have confidence that we’ll get there next year.
(Jaguars General Manager) Gene Smith’s a guy that I’ve gotten to know during this process, and he seems to be extremely capable. He’s going to put together a team.
When team owner Wayne Weaver was putting out a challenge to the sales office, he said it needed to sell the premium seats. Will you change your efforts in that regard?
We’re going to try to get help with that as well. I see why he’s doing it. It’s a source of income. But it (vacant seats on TV) just looks so bad over on that east side. Whoever does it, whether it’s Team Teal or whoever, we do need to try to find a way to get those seats filled up.
We definitely reversed the national media’s attitude about Jacksonville. In the latter part of the year, when the stories were being written about expansion, and going to Los Angeles and that sort of thing, Jacksonville didn’t even get mentioned in that story. That was probably the greatest success that we had, that we really eliminated that conversation, which was what we needed to do to help our image and to make sure we keep the Jaguars here.
Are you concerned that the situation might revert back to the point that the media start talking?
Wayne Weaver says he’s committed to Jacksonville. A couple of weeks ago, he made a statement that I picked up on, I think most of us realized anyway, and that is that he’s not going to own this team forever. It’s fairly well known that’s the case, that he wants to eventually find an owner that’s as committed to Jacksonville as he is.
I think that’s probably possible, and I don’t think he wants to move this team.
He was getting a lot of pressure last year. The league really was nailing him and saying to him, ‘you know, we and you probably made a mistake here. Your town is abandoning you.’
What happened was, we were just a year ahead of everybody else. Florida was that much worse off than everybody else. Jacksonville is that much worse off than many in Florida, and we were just a little bit early.
Then, of course, as we got better at that extra effort, everybody else got worse.
I think we have eliminated the threat. We just need to get the same number of people back in the stands that we had last year, do what’s possible to be done about that east side club, and then put a winning team on the field, and I think we’ll be fine.
Have officials from some of those other cities that also had ticket problems contacted you for advice?
They’ve been talking to the Jaguars. They have not talked to me. I think they have their own little club. Obviously, they meet regularly and they know each other. It would be kind of foolish if they weren’t calling the Jaguars, and saying, ‘wait a minute, we all went this way and you went that way, how did you do it?’
A grass roots effort is the same, no matter what community it’s in, so I think it could probably be done elsewhere. We’ve kind of done it twice now. We did it that first time, when we were pretty much dead. I remember the headline in the paper, it was that ‘The dream is dead.’ It’s over. That’s when they quit, and gave up, and fell apart, and all of that, and we were able to put that back together.
What about Jaguars head coach Jack Del Rio?
I don’t know Jack well. I know him like a fan. I think he’s obviously on a short leash. He was given an extension. I’ve heard and read all the same things that you have about that. And I really haven’t talked to Wayne since the season ended, so I don’t know what he’s thinking about.
How closely are you following the potential lockout, and how would a potential lockout damage your efforts?
I’m sure it wouldn’t help. I can’t imagine the big boys on both sides can’t get together on it.
The newspaper business was your career. How did you get in the business, and how did you end up as publisher of the metropolitan daily in Jacksonville, Florida?
I went to journalism school, to Georgia, but I was in the advertising and PR side as opposed to the editorial side. When I came out of school, I went to work in Atlanta for a newspaper that was in opposition to the Journal-Constitution. Within three months it failed and went out of business, and I was left standing there. The general manager from the (Morris Communications flagship newspaper) Augusta Chronicle came and interviewed some potential applicants. We had a big pool of people that didn’t have anything to do.
I was brand new, just out of college, and very inexperienced, and I was hired as an advertising salesman. I went over to Augusta, and was there for about a year, and then I got drafted and went into the service, spent a year in Vietnam, came back to Augusta, and then in the early ‘70s, the Morris family bought the Lubbock and Amarillo (Texas) newspapers.
I went to Lubbock as an ad director and stayed there 10 years. Jim Whyte was the publisher of the Amarillo paper, left there, and came to Jacksonville. I went to Amarillo as publisher. That was my first publisher job. That was in the early ‘80s.
I stayed there for about five years and then moved to the corporate office (in Augusta) as a corporate person in charge of a number of different papers, and when Jim Whyte retired here, I moved here and became publisher, a little over 20 years ago.
What was the most fun part of it?
I always enjoyed all of it. I’ve often said, when I got my PR degree, I never really saw that degree leading to being a newspaper publisher, but a newspaper publisher is definitely a business leader and has to lead the company and financially make the company successful.
But there’s a whole public side of being a publisher that the training in PR does lend itself to. It kind of fit me well.
I really enjoyed the community relations side, which is important in newspapers, that the paper be represented well in the community. I served on a number of boards, and in retirement, I’ve continued to do that. I think I’m on about five boards. I’ve been trying to get off some of them for about 10 years and I can’t.
I’ve been involved with the zoo about 15 years, and for about 20 years, I’ve been involved either on the executive committee or the board of the symphony. There’s never been a year that money wasn’t important to the symphony, and they continue to struggle with that.
I’m a trustee at the YMCA, and I’m past chairman of the Gator Bowl, and I’m still on the board of that. And I’m on the FSCJ Foundation board. I have evolved into being on the fund side of most of these organizations. I like to connect people that have the wherewithal to invest in a local institution.
And then on the side, we own a boat business, which has been fun, too.
What is the future of the newspaper industry?
People have asked me that a lot, and I think it’s going to be in its present form for another 20 years, 25 years, because there is still a large number of people of a certain age that still have that habit. I’m online every day, reading all the time, but the first thing I do in the morning is go and pick up my paper. And I always will.
It is an age-related thing, there’s no doubt about that, although my kids still regularly read the paper and take it at home, and they’re in their 30s and up to 40. But that’s not typical.
I think that the Times-Union will always be here. It will just be here in an electronic form. When that does happen, it will be a very, very different place.
There is that feeling out there that ‘I want it free,’ and that was one of the big items that we always struggled with in the early online days. It was, holy mackerel, we can’t really give this away. But everybody else did.
Then they had Craigslist and it was credited largely with taking all the newspaper classified advertising away, and it’s not totally true.
But I think the Times-Union’s greatest issue was not so much the Internet, as the economy. It went up somewhat slowly, and then at a pretty steep rate, and when it came down, it came straight down.
What do the changes mean to journalism, in terms of accurate reporting, the watchdog element?
I think it goes away. Those in print do more fact-checking than most. The bad side is, on the Internet side is, you don’t know what’s being checked. You’ve got to assume that the reliable big entities still have the same editorial attitude that we always had.
But I remember seeing a couple of years ago a lineup on TV, and here’s this person from Time magazine, and here’s this person from the Washington Post, and here’s this person, she’s from Susie’s Blog. And I thought, holy moly, has she ever come up in stature.
And when each gave their opinion, Susie’s Blog had the same prestige and power, and that’s on TV.
When you come over to just the Internet side, the question is, who’s editing Susie? I mean, everybody gets edited. Everybody gets fact-checked. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what stature you have. Who’s there to check Susie? Or to keep her honest? It gave me pause.
We get manipulated enough just by our sources manipulating us from time to time, but at least we’re smart enough to work against that. The online media, there are so many sources that are set up just to be manipulated.
We all know what the general level of awareness is of the public. The public really doesn’t know when they’ve been had.
What’s your schedule now as opposed to when you were publisher of the paper?
Well, pre-Touchdown Jacksonville, I got up and went to work every morning. We have a boat dealership that my son, Brett, primarily runs. I help with it, and that gives me a place to go. I just don’t go at 8:00 anymore. If I want to go at 10:00, or 10:30, or 11:00, I can.
And I have not-for-profit meetings. And then of course, Touchdown Jacksonville has gotten to where we were doing something almost every day for nine months. It was a pretty intense time, and I guess we’ll continue to do that. But I wouldn’t have felt good about staying home. One of the reasons that we bought that business back in ‘06, was that I knew I was going to retire in a couple of years and that was supposed to give me a really good place to go to make a profit. It’s just turned out to be out of the frying pan and into the fire, leaving the newspaper business and getting in the boat business.
What’s going on with the Jacksonville Civic Council now? What about those Downtown plans?
I have seen those plans, and they did a lot of work. This last meeting, we had some mayoral candidates. That group definitely will not come out and endorse a candidate. We’re really there to get informed. You couldn’t corral that group anyway, and tell them, ‘OK, you’re going to go and support one candidate or another.’ They let everybody come to their own conclusions.
There were about 35 or 40 people there. Out of the 50 we generally get about that many, because most of them are busy, and only about a third of them had made up their mind about the mayor’s race.
How important is this race going to be?
I’d say any mayor’s race is really important, but the issues are so much more dangerous right now. We’re reading today about communities that finally just throw their hands up and declare bankruptcy, and the fact (is) that we’re not far from being in that really bad situation.
At the Civic Council we had a couple of presentations by the mayor and a couple of budget folks, and they’re very concerned about it.
The pension issue has been around for quite a long time. I remember asking Governor Crist at an editorial board meeting what should be done about it. His response at the time was, ‘I like it just the way it is.’
The police and fire have enjoyed overwhelming public support, but I’m going to guess that their welcome is wearing out, because there are just so many people that are way, way, worse off than the police and fire ever thought about.
Is the next mayor ready for this?
The candidates are pretty sharp. Whether or not they have the will to do what has to be done is another question. We probably need to elect a one-term mayor. But if the facts as they lay out are correct, it’s a pension issue. Somebody’s got to find some way to get that done or I guess we head down that bankrupt road. Somebody better be prepared.
When was the last time you went on vacation?
I took a once-in-a-lifetime trip about three years ago when Rita and I went to Australia with good friends, Jim and Mary Winston, and that’s the last big trip. Our boat business has been so, so bad through all of ‘08 and all of ‘09, that we just couldn’t leave it. It was better in ‘10. We didn’t actually lose a lot of money in 2010.
What do you think about 2011 for the boat business?
We’re cautiously optimistic. I can remember going into the ‘08 and the ‘09 February boat shows, hoping to sell a couple of boats. I think it was the ‘08 show, we were at the Prime Osborn, and by 2 in the afternoon, the only people in that place were boat salesmen. It got a little bit better in ‘09, and then last year it was somewhat better, and we think it’s going to be pretty decent. Credit is getting a little easier.
I’ve really enjoyed being on the boat side of things, because my son Brett’s always been in fishing, and I’ve always had a boat. Our theory on that is if we could just kind of make a living, and make enough money to pay for our land, and come out enough to put a little bit of capital aside so you can prepare for another rainy day, that’s all we really want to do. It’s just been impossible. There are not that many boat dealers left.
Do you miss the newspaper business?
Overall, I miss it, but I’m not one to hang onto the past. I did that for 43 years, and I had always planned to retire at 65, and I did. And I did my year at Rotary, which was really a lot of fun. I enjoyed doing that, and came in (as president) right after I retired, so that virtually filled in a year. When you’re meeting 40 times a year, that’s really a blast to do.
What about Downtown? Do you have any predictions about what could happen? Do we revitalize Downtown?
It just takes money. And even the (Civic Council) plan, you’re probably not going to be surprised a lot. Do you use the Prime Osborn? Do you go where City Hall is? Do you go down to between here and the stadium? What do you do with it, how do you build a night life, how do you build a community Downtown? They’ve been talking about that a long time.
In the last two years, the mayor said maybe we ought to have a feasibility study, and then his rhetoric has been a little bit more, maybe we ought to have a convention center. A new convention center would be built for the future, obviously, and they do work.
Will there be money for a convention center?
I’ll assume they’ll have some tax money. It’s bondable.
I think the one we had was fine for 20 years ago. I just think it has not grown up with our city.
We’ve really got a nice arena, we’ve got a nice ballpark, we have a nice football stadium, we just didn’t go the convention center route.