TechNews Visits

Orlando's Multimedia Empire

by Christopher J. Feola and L. Carol Christopher

"For The Orlando Sentinel and Central Florida News 13, this is Mary Shanklin."

Every once in a while, you visit an organization and it is immediately apparent that the people working there just "get it."

Orlando Sentinel Communications just gets it.

Outside, the Sentinel looks like a traditional newspaper. Inside, they're busy forging a multimedia future.

A central control desk located in the middle of the newsroom runs coverage for the newspaper, four online products and a 24-hour local news channel. The newspaper's parent--Tribune Co. of Chicago--owns 50 percent of the news channel. The newspaper has its own video-production facility at the television station. Print- and online-ad reps make joint sales calls.

All of which leads to an obvious question: The folks at the Orlando Sentinel "get it," but does that mean that they just get the buzz words? Or are they actually getting some online revenue?

Listen to Julie Anderson, the business-development manager for Orlando Sentinel Interactive: "Last year, we took in $1.4 million in local online advertising, supplemented by national advertising."

The Sentinel's product mix includes:

• The Orlando Sentinel--the printed newspaper
  
  
• Central Florida News 13--the 24-hour local news channel
  
  
• Orlando Sentinel Online--the online newspaper
  
  
• Digital City Orlando--part of the Digital Cities project, which appears both on the World Wide Web and America Online
  
  
• Go2Orlando--a travel site built to serve the heavy traffic to Orlando's attractions, which include major theme parks such as Disney World, Sea World and Universal Studios
  
  
• Black Voices--an online community for African Americans and African American interests.

What makes it all come together? That raised desk in the middle of the newsroom, according to Keith Wheeler, deputy managing editor for multimedia.

"The key is to have the editors together. Phones are not enough," says Wheeler. "I can't remember to tell people everything. But if we are right here together, we can hear what each other is doing, and we can say, 'Send a video camera along.'"

Wheeler says there are a few drawbacks to the desk, which is a roughly 10-foot-by-30-foot raised platform in the center of the newsroom. The editors sit facing outward with their terminals in front of them--mostly Sony 20-inch monitors sunk into the desk at an angle. A shoulder-high wall surrounds the entire edifice.

"I kind of feel like a bartender," says Wheeler, "and everybody runs their hand along the top as they go by for some reason. I always tell them, 'Thanks for dusting.'"

Wheeler points to Shanklin's investigation of trailer safety as a good example of how things work in Orlando.

The newspaper did an in-depth project on the subject. There are safety regulations for the construction and installation of trailers, but many Florida trailers are older than the regulations. The report focused in particular on tie-down straps, or the lack thereof.

The printed story ran in the Sunday Sentinel. But the video version began running on Saturday night with this tag line: "For the complete story, see the Sunday Sentinel." The story repeated throughout the day on Sunday.

Both sides see the relationship as symbiotic. The paper, obviously, gets television promos for its best work. And Channel 13 gets depth and breadth to its coverage that most television stations can't match, according to the station's general manager, Craig Hume.

"The Sentinel has 350 beat reporters and columnists covering the city. You can't match that with the 15 reporters that a television station has," says Hume. "The partnership gives us exclusive material on a regular basis."

And a 24-hour local television station has a lot of news hole to fill. Hume says the station uses a news wheel composed of 48 half-hour shows.

The station, which went on the air Oct. 29, 1997, gets about 15 percent of its content on a given day from the Sentinel, with the remaining 85 percent produced by the station's own staff.

The online products, meanwhile, have a staff of 47, with seven staffers working in the newsroom, according to Anderson. The online products are housed in a separate building a short walk from the main newspaper.

The print and new-media staffs are learning to work together.

"Before, there was little sales coordination," Anderson says. "Now we sometimes make joint sales calls with the print salespeople. We offer commissions for [online-advertising] sales by print people."

The Sentinel plans to grow the products, Anderson says. These include the possibility of directories and the installation of community-building software. A community recruiter/trainer has been hired for that effort.

That won't be the first community project, though. Black Voices has shown very good growth, according to founder and General Manager Barry Cooper. "Black Voices is a virtual community. We offer interactivity more than news."

One example is a member-photos service. "We average 300-to-350 member photos a month," says Cooper. "We have had 14 marriages in the last 18 months. There have been no divorces--yet. We've got our fingers crossed."

Black Voices has 100,000-to-150,000 members--50 percent women--most of whom visit three times a week. It is trying to become a venue for national advertising. To that end, it has sales offices in New York City and Orlando, and a sales rep in Los Angeles.

Breaking Down the Walls

Along with the ongoing technical and facility changes, the newspaper-turned- multimedia-information provider has also rethought its organizational boundaries. The Sentinel's Cross-Functional Team Project will bring advertising and pre-press personnel, who jointly produce over 225,000 ads and 3.5 million ad column inches per year, into much closer contact.

Using tools developed by Blevins Harding Group of Boulder, Colo., work-flow analysis and brainstorming sessions were held to define the scope of the project, benchmark models operating at other properties and develop a model best suited for the Sentinel.

By creating and empowering teams to handle sales as well as the creation and input of ads, the Sentinel hopes to improve productivity, reduce errors and enhance creativity. The cross-functional team concept should improve sales time, ownership of work, morale and communications.

BHG is building the working model for the pilot teams, determining area space requirements, and helping plan team work areas for both the pilot program and for full implementation. The pilot phase will last through 1998, with full implementation to follow.

Press & Packaging Expansion

Along with the emphasis on new-media ventures, the Sentinel is also implementing an enormous, three-phase press-expansion project that includes five new 70-ton Newsliner Color press towers from Goss Graphic Systems Inc. of Westmont, Ill. Editor John Haile says this is an indisputable sign of the Sentinel's confidence in the future of print.

With the new press expansion, Jim Catron, pressroom manager, says the Sentinel will have a total of 65 printing equipment units-and capacity to run over 6,000 56-page products per minute with eight full pages of color per product. The $3 million project also includes expansion of the ink-storage and plateroom facilities.

In November 1995, BHG completed a packaging-center study for the Sentinel. The objective was to understand how the current site could adapt to expanded packaging-center needs brought on by continued zoning and circulation increases. Initial projections called for six inserting machines to meet daily and Sunday demand, assuming a two-part daily and three-part Sunday product. At the time, the Sentinel also was evaluating the press-expansion project, so staying on the current site for as long as possible was a critical goal.

The Sentinel runs 8,000 plates a week on three plate lines. Signs remind employees to check plate dates and use the oldest ones first.

The study compared the operational and cost impacts for retaining all inserting on site with moving some inserting off site to minimize need for a building expansion. Additional objectives included increased space for newsprint and pallet storage, and waste handling, as well as loading carts for all products.

The study indicated that daily and Sunday packaging needs could be accommodated on the current site for at least five if not 10 additional years through a reconfiguration and expansion project.

BHG's design phase began after approval of the project in 1996. Construction started in January 1997, and the multi-phased project is expected to be completed in October 1998.

Approximately 80,000 square feet were reconfigured, of which about 18,000 square feet were added from expansion.

A 10-day supply of black ink and a three-week supply of color are kept in storage. Weight cells help track ink inventory and usage.

To facilitate cart loading on the very restricted site, the existing tray was removed and the docks angled. Removing the tray created enough space to manually load carts-space that would be available for automatic loading in the future. By angling the dock, each of the 12 loading positions can accommodate the 48-foot trailers used by transportation.

Home-delivery and outlying state products went to distribution centers or drop points using carts. One of the challenges was to determine how to accommodate the various vehicle types used by the independent contractors for single copies. After studying several options, the Sentinel determined that the most effective way to streamline and simplify the operation was to load all product in carts. Single-copy product carts are lowered to grade level by dock lifts, which are interspersed with traditional dock levelers used to load the 48-foot trailers. Once at grade, independent contractors roll the cart on the flat, covered concrete dock apron to their vehicles.

An 18,000-square-foot warehouse expansion stores 853 newsprint rolls. The paper consumes 60,000 tons of newsprint per year.

The change to loading carts in the packaging center is expected to save up to 15 minutes for each truckload.

The building expansion constructed adjacent to the current inserting area accomplished several things: It provided space to accommodate a 10-year pallet storage requirement, added several dock positions over the existing layout, and expanded newsprint storage by approximately 100 percent.

The Sentinel's packaging department currently takes four minutes to change zones. It hopes to cut that figure to 30 seconds.

To maintain operations, the dock reconfiguration was accomplished in three segments. One third of the dock was taken out of service and reconfigured, while the other two thirds were kept in service with the tray system using traditional boom loaders. Once the first third was completed, the next segment was reconfigured. Following that, the tray was removed and the final third was reconfigured. In total, it took 4-1/2 months to reconfigure the docks.

What's next? Russ Newton, the packaging-center manager, hopes his department will be able to reduce to 30 seconds the average four minutes now needed to change over the inserters to support each of the paper's 132 zones. That'll shave another 400-plus minutes off the production cycle, Newton says.

Considering all this investment in both multimedia and traditional print operations, the only constant for The Orlando Sentinel, it seems, is change.

Christopher J. Feola is director of the Media Center at the American Press Institute. E-mail, feola@apireston.org; phone, (703) 715-3333. L. Carol Christopher is president of Christopher Communications in Berkeley, Calif. E-mail, cchristo@weber.ucsd.edu; phone, (510) 444-7841. Photos by David Cotton, The Orlando Sentinel.

TechNews Volume 4, Number 4: July/August 1998

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