Bay Times, the paper's weekday tabloid tbt*, a free daily publication and which used "(* Tampa Bay Times)" as its subtitle, became just tbt when the name change took place. The St. Pete Times name lives on as the name for the Times neighborhood news sections in southern Pinellas County (formerly Neighborhood Times), serving communities from Largo southward. The Times has also done significant investigative reporting on the Church of Scientology, since the church's acquisition of the Fort Harrison Hotel in 1975 and other holdings in Clearwater. The Times has published special reports and series critical of the church and its current leader, David Miscavige. In 2010, the Times published an investigative report questioning the validity of the United States Navy Veterans Association, leading to significant reaction and official investigations into the group nationwide. On May 3, 2016, the Times acquired its longtime competitor The Tampa Tribune, with the latter publication immediately ceasing publishing and Tribune features and some writers expected to be merged into the Times. As reported by other local media outlets in the Tampa Bay area at the time of this acquisition, for many years the Tampa Tribune was considered to be the more conservative newspaper in the region, while the Tampa Bay Times was thought of as more liberal. The Times purchase of The Tribune also allowed its circulation area to be expanded into Polk County, placing it in competition with other newspapers such as The Lakeland Ledger and The Polk County Democrat, as well as into the south central region of the state known as the Florida Heartland. In the case of the latter, the Times published Highlands Today, which was a daily news supplement of The Tribune for readers in Highlands County. The Times sold the paper in 2016 to Sun Coast Media Group. The Times received $8.5 million in federal loans from the Paycheck Protection Program by July 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. By this point, they had reduced delivery to two days per week. They had also cut 11 journalists' jobs through layoffs expected before the pandemic. PolitiFact.com The newspaper created PolitiFact.com, a project in which its reporters and editors "fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups…" They publish original statements and their evaluations on the PolitiFact.com website, and assign each a "Truth-O-Meter" rating, with ratings ranging from "True" for completely true statements to "Pants on