By Justine Griffin for the Tampa Bay Times
Selling clothes and accessories to teenagers changes as quickly as a Snapchat message disappears.
Tag Archives: Justine Griffin
A good cup of joe wasn’t always easy to find in the Tampa Bay area.
By Justine Griffin for the Tampa Bay Times
A good cup of joe wasn’t always easy to find in the Tampa Bay area.
News Writer of the Year by Gatehouse Media
Justine Griffin was awarded the News Writer of the Year award for 2014 by Gatehouse Media, the parent company of the Herald-Tribune Media Group for the “Best of GateHouse 2014” awards, which included entries from newspapers across the media player’s hundreds of publications.
“Justine Griffin’s first-person report on egg harvesting is so different, so deep in detail, and such a good story that it alone pushes her to the top of a very competitive field. It’s a gutsy move to undergo a risky procedure and write about virtually every detail,” the judges said.
Third place in the projects category went to business writer Griffin for her first-person story about the pitfalls of egg donation, “The Cost of Life.”
Griffin also won second place for “Multimedia Journalist of the Year.”
The Cost of Life wins first place for general feature in 2014 Excellence-in-Features Awards
The Cost of Life won first place in a national 2014 Excellence-in-Features contest by the Society for Features Journalism today in the “general feature” division one category.
Judge’s comments: “This first-person, long-form narrative immediately s your attention. Plenty has been written about egg donation – the typical pieces about the cute college girls who are recruited to go through the process and the money they make. But this writer flipped it all on its ear and looked at the underbelly of a trend that sounds as though it can have only a happy ending but, in truth, can cause great physical harm. The author reminds us that this brave-new-world technology is not nearly as regulated as it should be – and that technology is not necessarily the answer to everyone’s prayers.”
Coffee company awarded spot at Tampa airport has history of financial troubles
By Justine Griffin for the Tampa Bay Times
Today, Herb Colvin runs a coffee stand inside a Hillsborough County Public Schools building, sells organic teas and coffees at farmers markets and other locales, and has a record of financial problems, including federal and state tax liens, evictions, a foreclosure and a bankruptcy.
By 2017, Colvin will have a $1.3 million stake in the restaurant operations of the $953 million renovation of Tampa International Airport. His Bay Coffee & Tea Company is the minority partner in one of the 11 concessionaire groups that won highly sought-after spots to sell food and goods at the airport.
A Dun & Bradstreet credit evaluation of Bay Coffee puts it in a ”higher risk” category for making late payments and suggests a credit limit of $20,000. The report was provided to the Tampa Bay Times by an airport consultant who works with another Tampa concessionaire, George Tinsley Sr. Tinsley lost a bid for a spot in TIA’s concessions lineup and has filed a protest regarding the win by Colvin and his partner.
Colvin and his partner scored a 91.3 out of 100 for their proposal, the highest bid in their group by 6.4 points based on the overall concept, layout, experience, business plan and the potential to generate revenue for the airport. But an airport spokeswoman acknowledged that officials there did not conduct any analysis of Colvin’s finances.
Read more here.