The New York Times wrote about egg donation and included The Cost of Life in this Oct. 21, 2016, piece.
“Justine Griffin submitted an application to donate her eggs to a fertility clinic in Florida, detailing everything about herself from her appearance to her SAT scores. An infertile couple liked what they saw on paper and Ms. Griffin was notified that they wanted to buy her eggs.”
By Justine Griffin for the Tampa Bay Times. October 14, 2016
Orlando International Airport hasn’t ever had trouble recruiting new flights.
Airliners have been lining up for years to link new cities from around the globe to Disney World, Universal Studios and Central Florida’s other tourism attractions.
But last year, the Orlando airport introduced a financial incentive program meant to help lure new airline business.
The program mimicked what Tampa International Airport instituted more than five years ago, which has helped bring high-profile international flights like nonstop service to Frankfurt, Germany, on Lufthansa and service to Panama City, Panama, on Copa Airlines, to Tampa Bay.
The new incentive program in Orlando ultimately helped the airport draw a nonstop flight to Dubai on international airliner Emirates.
Tampa’s entry into the world of airline incentives didn’t come without controversy: Airport CEO Joe Lopano drew public criticism when he asked for permission to throw money at airlines after he arrived in Tampa in 2011. He eventually got the go-ahead, but it was new terrain for the airport.
Read more in the Tampa Bay Times here.
By Justine Griffin for the Tampa Bay Times.
First came the irritation when Deneen Wyman discovered she had bought expired baby formula at an area Walmart store on Sunday. Then came the added insult when she sought a refund and was sold yet another baby formula that had been outdated since May.
It wasn’t an isolated incident.
Read more in the Tampa Bay Times here.
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And the follow up story:
Shoppers in St. Petersburg took to Facebook to express their outrage over finding expired baby formula and other goods at a local Walmart three weeks ago. The post quickly went viral.
Poynter featured the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s project, Unravel, which is a millennial news site for young professionals in the Sarasota area. I was one of the founding editors behind the project.
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The idea for a site devoted to Sarasota’s millennials didn’t come from that generation. It came from a design-thinking challenge led by Bill Church, the newly appointed senior vice president for news at parent company GateHouse Media.
The challenge? Figure out a way to reach an audience they weren’t serving.
A small team at the Herald-Tribune started with focus groups and get-togethers. That team, led by Justine Griffin, decided not to treat a generation as if it were all the same. Young professionals, they figured, were already invested and active in the community. Now, they needed to be informed.
But they didn’t want to be fooled.
“They said the biggest thing they didn’t want was to be duped into going back to Herald-Tribune,” said Griffin, 28, who’s now a business reporter at the Poynter-owned Tampa Bay Times.
Read more here.
By Justine Griffin for the Tampa Bay Times. Sept. 23, 2016.
It’s one thing to decide which building goes where when mapping out a new $3 billion district for downtown Tampa. But it’s another challenge entirely to create a sense of place and identity that has been lacking in downtown Tampa for decades when there isn’t much history in that part of town.
hat’s the problem facing James Nozar, the man in charge of Strategic Property Partners’ plan to build a new 53-acre urban core for Tampa from the ground up. As the chief executive of SPP, the real estate firm owned by Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik and Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment, he’s working with 17 architects, planners and designers to create a unifying theme across the entire district as they build it block by block.
“There’s not a neighborhood or great historic presence to look back to. That’s our biggest challenge,” Nozar said about the greater downtown Tampa area. “So we’ve had to use the unique Tampa climate to influence the sense of place we’re trying to create.”
Read more in the Tampa Bay Times here.