At Tampa’s News Center, Convergence Emerges
by Pete Wetmore
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| The $40 million News Center brings together three Media General Inc. properties—The Tampa Tribune, WFLA-TV and Tampa Bay Online. The ongoing convergence experiment has already netted nearly $1.5 million in additional revenue. |
To leap into the evolving world of media convergence, just walk up two steps to the multimedia news desk of the Tampa News Center.
"News Center" is the unadorned name for a cutting-edge facility housing The Tampa Tribune, WFLA-TV and Tampa Bay Online (TBO.com). The $40 million building, which squats on the west bank of the Hillsborough River in downtown Tampa, opened last spring.
The three media outlets, all owned by Media General Inc. of Richmond, Va., were brought under one new roof to create a single news-gathering operation feeding print, television and the World Wide Web. Print reporters appear on television, and their copy may show up on TBO.com long before the presses in an older building next door begin to roll. Broadcast personalities write for the Tribune, images taken by TV camera crews are published in the newspaper, and the TBO.com staff preps copy and images from the other two outlets for quick posting on the Web.
While the News Center is still mastering this level of coordination—collaboration among the three outlets still largely involves only breaking-news events and long-range stories—last year, Media General logged more than 600 "acts of convergence" (see SuperConference coverage, p. 19), and the pace is quickening.
Model Behavior
The media industry is following Tampa’s progress closely, as many other publishers, including Tribune Co. of Chicago, The Arizona Republic in Phoenix and cross-bay rival the St. Petersburg Times, have initiated their own multimedia partnerships.
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| The News Center's open atrium links the third-floor print newsroom with broadcast and online operations below. |
Positioning itself as a media force in the Southeast, Media General has embraced convergence with a passion. Five other Media General markets boast similar broadcast-print configurations, but none is as large as Tampa, and nowhere else does the company own a newspaper and TV station in the same city. (Its twin Tampa flagships have waivers from the federal cross-ownership ban.)
"Media General has established a very impressive structure to capitalize on multiple media platforms," observes Randy Bennett, NAA vice president of electronic media and industry development. "They freely admit that they do not yet have it all figured out. But they are well positioned to be leaders in providing content to consumers where they want it and when they want it."
Equally important, a business model is emerging, with nearly $1.5 million in fourth-quarter sales already attributed to convergence efforts, says Rob Runett, NAA’s manager of electronic-media analysis. "If this figure grows during the next two quarters, expect other companies to more rapidly map convergence efforts," he says, noting that Media General could "build a considerable side business ‘bottling’ its formula and licensing it to media organizations across the globe."
Managers at the Tampa News Center agree the Center will be a proving ground for both a convergence business model and the technology to drive it. "It is totally a work in progress," Kirk Read, general manager of TBO.com, says of both convergence frontiers. Adds Jerry Chambers, the Tribune’s senior editor for technology, "It’s going to take some more advanced vendor than what’s available now." While several suppliers are exploring convergence, "they’re not there yet," he adds.
In the meantime, the News Center relies on proven technology, some of it state of the art, to paginate the Tribune, air WFLA programming and maintain TBO.com’s three sites, which are hosted by Media General in Richmond. BudgetBank, a browser-based intranet application, is the center’s first attempt to use a single tool to tie together three media.
With BudgetBank slated for a late-February launch, staffers have high hopes for the in-house system, which replaces the "sneakernet" shuffling of printed story budgets and other material among news outlets.
The ultimate goal is an industrial-strength, content-management system expressly for convergence newsrooms, says Chambers. Such a system would use Extensible Markup Language to handle all data, allowing the automated transfer of all manner of files. "That’s the core," Chambers says, who acknowledges that such a system remains a long way off.
Breaking Barriers
For those inside the News Center, the building’s very design is a daily reminder of their cross-media efforts. Its four floors feature handsome dark paneling and glass partitions, and bulge with state-of-the-art broadcasting equipment whose primary color is black. A mammoth rooftop patio offers a front-row seat for studying downtown’s skyscrapers; inside, the many-sided building is awash in sunlight passing through huge windows on every floor.
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| Located on a raised platform at the base of the buildingšs open atrium, the multimedia desk brings together print, broadcast and online editors. |
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| With a WFLA-TV monitor reminding Tribune reporters of their convergence companions, Multimedia Editor Steve DeGregorio, left, talks with Executive Editor and Vice President Gil Thelen. |
The Tribune’s third-floor newsroom looks familiar. Row upon row of desks—the paper has hundreds of journalists—stand next to low walls that pose no barrier to communications. Anyone at any desk can surf the ’Net at any time. A sign hangs over the business desk: "Please don’t feed the reporters." PC monitors are everywhere, holding down positions that brown SII Coyote terminals occupied in a previous newsroom incarnation.
An atrium penetrates the heart of the News Center, establishing a channel through which light—and impromptu communications—can pass from the print newsroom to the other media one floor below. At the bottom of this well stands the multimedia assignment desk, modeled after the elevated news desks native to television newsrooms.
Here, editors from the Tribune, WFLA and TBO.com work together, sitting two steps up from the first tier of workstations. An archivist, editor for the cable Florida Newschannel, multimedia editor, photo and graphics editors, and TBO.com editor occupy the chairs, virtually around the clock. At the pinnacle of the multimedia desk sits WFLA’s assignment editor.
From this multimedia stronghold, editors can converse with the WFLA helicopter, which flies almost continuously in search of news; direct scores of print and broadcast reporters in the field; and dispatch the 47-person Tribune photo staff. They monitor an endless torrent of stories, images and graphics carrying news as it happens to hundreds of thousands of readers, viewers and Web surfers.
Story ideas are shared among decision-makers for each media outlet, and breaking news is filtered through the multimedia desk. "They are still in the ‘teamwork’ stage as opposed to the full-on convergence model some in the industry have prophesied," observes Runett.
As Media General continues moving toward full-on convergence, how does it view the News Center’s vast resources? "One huge pool from which three separate voices come" is how Read describes it. Read studied philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, cut his media teeth on television production at Media General’s Charleston, S.C., station, and wound up in Tampa as a key architect in bridging the cultural gap between the Tribune and WFLA.
"What we’re doing here is about more," Read says—more content, more immediacy, more innovation, more exploration of what news is and how to present it. The cross-currents of decidedly different cultures have been channeled into mutual respect and a common bond of blazing new trails across multiple media.
"You’re providing a creative environment so you hope they can grow," Read says. Reporters, he adds, "are becoming platform-agnostic journalists," intent on getting their stories out early, often and to as many minds as possible.
Consumers are the beneficiaries. They see WFLA weathercasters giving them hourly updates on TBO.com during hurricane season, read WFLA’s chief anchor writing about the environment in the Tribune, and enjoy video sent by Tribune sportswriters from the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney for use only on TBO.com.
Pulling it all Together
The News Center’s three media outlets rely on a range of systems to produce their primary products and exchange content—some old, some new, all fully digital.
WFLA, the NBC affiliate serving the nation’s 13th largest broadcast market, has replaced videotape with video files dished up from servers. Editing digital video is a breeze, Read says—just identify the desired clip, then click and drag it to another file for insertion in a news presentation.
The News Center’s first floor is a maze of television-editing cubicles, a huge news studio featuring robotic cameras and a control room for producing live news programs. The multimedia desk sits at the base of the second-floor atrium. Behind a glass wall, a bank of television monitors fill a control room from which WFLA talks to satellites across the sky.
Next door is the TBO.com nerve center, a single room lined with desks at which Web designers, editors and writers update their sites. Assembled in the last year, Read’s staff operates three distinct sites, each providing breaking news in ways tailored to its namesake.
WFLA.com focuses on the "personality-franchise type stuff" that drives television, he says, while TampaTrib. com is a more conventional newspaper site. TBO.com brings in the most visitors of the three, offering video clips, constant text updates and opportunities for interaction.
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| The WFLA-TV news set features robotic cameras and other state-of-the-art broadcast equipment. The station has made the switch from videotape to all-digital video, simplifying editing and reuse. |
TBO’s room is staffed 22 hours a day, Read says, and any staffer not there can get password-protected access to the same news and information from home, over the Internet.
Upstairs, the third-floor newsroom of the 199,753-circulation Tribune rings the atrium with desks for reporters and the electronic archive’s staff. Chambers’ crew attends to tasks common to any newspaper tech staff. They monitor the health of a Tandem-based legacy newsroom system from System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento, installed in 1987 and refreshed with PCs running Decade 97, the Coyote-lookalike interface from CE Engineering of Loomis, Calif. "We upgraded it three years ago to get everyone on PCs," Chambers says, "because we sort of saw this coming down the road."
Text from reporters and editors working on SII gets into print via a two-year-old NewsMaker pagination system from Harris Publishing Systems Corp. of Melbourne, Fla. NewsMaker sends page geometry to SII, where editors trim stories and crop photos, then shuttle page-ready files to Harris for output to page negatives.
Tribune editors also drop copy into a basket that their counterparts at TBO.com and WFLA can access, as well as an archive system all three media use. Chambers salutes Systems Editor Kim Pollard for her role in establishing firm links between SII and NewStar, the television-newsroom system from Avid Technologies of Tewksbury, Mass., and IPS, TBO.com’s Web-production system from Open Market Inc. of Burlington, Mass.
In the last three years, Chambers says, the photo staff has migrated to digital photography—both still and video. With still cameras turning out JPEG files, he says, "sometimes [photographers] don’t even come back—we’ve equipped them all with digital phones" so they can upload files as they roam.
The digital tide has carried away more than film. "There used to be a composing room," he says. "There really is not any more."
To gauge the impact of convergence, Chambers and Read separately cite a major fire last year in Ybor City, a Tampa historic district. The Channel 8 helicopter began transmitting video 10 minutes after the dimensions of the fire became known; those clips swiftly passed through a video encoder en route to TBO.com, providing moving pictures of the event that were updated throughout the day.
Tribune photographers returned from the scene with digital photos taken with Kodak cameras, fed them to the paper’s Merlin photo archive system from T/One (now MerlinOne Inc.) of Quincy, Mass., and immediately shared them with TBO.com. WFLA broadcast extensive coverage live and on its newscasts. The next day’s Tribune detailed Ybor City’s history and economics, and profiled major players in its development. And all reports were archived for swift reuse down the road.
For Read, the Ybor City fire was the News Center’s proof of concept.
"It gets to be really powerful," he says, "in a breaking-news situation."
Wetmore is an Urbana, Ill., free-lancer. E-mail, pete@net-haven.net.