Sunshine boy.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: Marty Donsky in Florida - Editorial

Sunshine boy

Our man in Tampa wanted to talk about the weather.

That's not why I'd called Marty Donsky. Florida, according to those we interviewed for our cover story on the Atlantic Coast Conference, is if not the land of milk and honey then certainly the land of opportunity. And though I'd spent the first half of the '80s as an editor at The Miami Herald, I've been back in North Carolina more than five years. In a state where change is as fast and furious as it is in Florida, that was eons ago.

So I decided to quiz Donsky, who left BNC at the end of last year to become editor of the Tampa Bay Business Journal, on the local angle. It also gave me an excuse to check on how he's doing.

That he'd been in the Sunshine State less than two months wouldn't, I knew, prevent him from making some sweeping judgments. As a veteran political writer, he is well versed in how to shore up a shortage of facts and first-hand knowledge with a surplus of rumor and innuendo. (Heh, heh, just a little joke there, Marty.)

"This place, not so much in geography as in people, is big," he told me. "So the state is on the cutting edge of whatever is big. And companies have to have the latest technology because the place is so big."

Now, whenever he goes into a Publix (kind of like the Florida version of a Harris Teeter), he can pay for groceries with his bank card. On the other hand, every time he walks into his bank -- the same branch he goes to several times a week -- he has to whip out some identification. Florida is a state on the move: People come, people go.

"One of the things that is real important is that everybody is from somewhere...