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May/June 2000 | Contents
THE MULTIMEDIA NEWSROOM
Three Organizations Aim For Convergence In Newly Designed Tampa Headquarters
BY ALY COLON
Rocky Glisson, an assignment editor for WFLA-TV, Tampa Bay's NBC affiliate, occupies the "hot seat" on the oval-shaped "superdesk" at Media General's Newscenter facility.
From his perch, on the top level of a three-tiered, starship-like deck that rises several feet from the second floor, he surveys a state-of-the-art newsroom that hugs the
Hillsborough River, visible through the newsroom's glass walls. He also can see and talk to reporters, producers, photographers, and editors who stop by, their voices floating upward through a wide atrium toward the third floor where the staff of the Tampa Tribune newspaper works.
The words "hot seat" and "superdesk" represent just the most obvious descriptions for this futuristic news desk, one designed from the outset to serve a multimedia mission. It includes not only Media General's TV newspeople, but those from its daily newspaper and online site as well.
The idea of converging operations isn't new. Back in the 1950s, some newspapers owned television stations and shared news functions. But the move by Media General speaks of a much broader approach. Rather than having their newspeople working for just one medium, the company sees possibilities for converging their different news operations and thereby multiplying the number of platforms through which they distribute the news simultaneously. For the convergence of the physical mediums of the computer and television to take place in such a way as to provide substantive news content, it will need to be accompanied by a multimedia newsroom.
Is Tampa's Newscenter the newsroom of the future? If it is, it means substantive changes in the way journalists do their jobs.
This particular spring morning, for example, Glisson keeps glancing at fourteen TV monitors that stretch across the wall book-ended by two large clocks. His ears stay tuned to seven scanners just in front of him, and to the multi-line phone nearby.
As he does his morning monitoring, he gets tipped off to a broken water main gushing during a drought and water restriction period in Tampa. He alerts one of his photographers to check it out and confirm the information. Then he tells Doug Anderson, WFLA's assignment manager, who shares the top deck with him.
Anderson assigns a WFLA reporter and photojournalist so they can get video for the morning and evening news blocks, and he tells the producers about it at WFLA's 9 a.m. news meeting. He also tips off the newspaper's photo team leader, Todd Chappel, who sits below, on the second deck on the superdesk. Chappel in turn sends one of his photographers to snap a shot for the next day's newspaper edition.
Steve De Gregorio, who sits next to Chappel, makes a note to pass the information on to the Tribune's editors at the newspaper's 10:30 a.m. budget meeting. As the multimedia editor, he's the liaison between WFLA, the Tribune, and TBO.com (Tampa Bay Online). He scrolls through the news budgets of the three organizations, looking for additional opportunities of convergence.
Just down the desk from De Gregorio, Jim Riley, TBO.com's interim content editor -- online's equivalent of a TV news director or a newspaper managing editor -- stops by to talk to his staffers on the superdesk. They update news for MSNBC and remain alert for ideas they can use on their Web site.
Glisson glances about, monitoring the activity. "This is quite a different newsroom from the one I came into twenty-eight years ago," he says, his tone underscoring just what an understatement that is.
The new, $40 million, 120,000 square foot, temple of convergence is Media General's answer to the challenge of the future, establishing the Richmond-based company's Florida gulf coast news outlets as the dominant source of information in the Tampa Bay market.
They face stiff competition. Tampa Bay, the nation's thirteenth largest television market, includes such news competitors as CBS's WTSP-TV, Fox's WTVT-TV, and ABC's WFTS-TV, as well as the St. Petersburg Times just across the bay. (The Poynter Institute, which I am employed by, a nonprofit school for journalists, owns the St. Petersburg Times, but operates separately from the newspaper.) But Media General's local news executives see this convergence as their opportunity to bigfoot them all. While WFLA, the Tribune, and TBO.com maintain separate newsrooms and make their own individual news decisions about coverage, they hope that sharing the same space will lead to a synaptic intimacy that creates a pervasive, powerful presence.
"The work," says Gil Thelen, the Tribune's executive editor and vice president, who notes he was the chairman of the ASNE change committee in the mid-1990s, is "just what my career prepared me for over the past twenty years. Now I have the big one."
Other news organizations, such as the Tribune Company (see previous story), the A.H. Belo Corp., KUSA-TV in Denver, and the Denver Post, the Orange County Register, and the Sarasota Herald Tribune, have either shared resources, formed partnerships, and/or offered crossover news between television, newspapers, and online sites. But Tampa's approach appears to be the first such attempt to put all three news mediums in one place at one time. They plan intentionally, and strategically, to increase the opportunities for each of them to not only work with, but also work within, each of the other's setting. And they'll be working with each other constantly, every minute of every day.
These interrelationships began before they moved in together during the early part of March, when both the ninety-two-member WFLA staff and the approximately 210 Tribune news and editorial staff shifted all their people and equipment without missing a deadline. And it shows itself in different ways.
Tribune newspaper reporters appear on, and prepare packages for, WFLA-TV. WFLA-TV reporters write by-lined stories that appear in the Tribune. TBO.com creates additional news information that allows viewers and readers to drill for even more detailed and widespread information and links, enhancing the credibility of its Web site by displaying on TBO's opening screen the WFLA logo and the Tampa Tribune flag, both of which have broad recognition and reputations in the Tampa Bay marketplace.
The TBO.com operation welcomes the opportunity to go beyond "shovelware," the reusing of information already provided on TV or in the newspaper, hoping that its stronger information base will lead to more creative news presentations. WFLA welcomes the additional staff on the newspaper that can be called upon to help them keep up with the news in the Tampa television market of almost 1.5 million households. The Tribune sees the benefit of getting wider exposure within, and outside, its own circulation area, which in March totaled 245,246 daily, and 336,203 on Sunday.
All this enthusiasm comes tempered with the philosophical and cultural challenges the integration of these different mediums must address. In the weeks before the move, representatives from the television station, the newspaper, and the online site began gathering at what they've dubbed "prenuptial" meetings, meetings designed to smooth out any differences and pave the way toward happy union.
Discussions during these sessions have ranged from specific, logistical arrangements for alerting everyone to breaking news -- use the paging system or an intranet setup -- to the core news values and practices each believe in.
"An ongoing concern is how to integrate the entrepreneur into a traditional culture," Thelen says. "This will be a challenge for the company to adjust to. We want to place a high value on experimental risk-taking, rather than on the tried and true journalism story."
The conversations have been wide-ranging and passionate: their goal to become a unified, dominant information source for Tampa Bay challenged by the differences in their approach. How different became evident during one prenuptial discussion on the way they might cover a future hotel shooting spree similar to one that occurred a few months ago at a local Radisson and left several people dead.
Dan Bradley, WFLA's news director, trying to envision such a scenario, saw the opportunity for the reporter who first arrives on that kind of a shooting scene to let television and newspaper know immediately. The reporter could then file something, if reliable, directly to the online site. But Lawrence Fletcher, the Tribune's senior editor for news, questioned whether he would be comfortable putting anything online before it went through an editor, citing credibility concerns. Meanwhile, TBO's Riley wondered what took priority on the Web.
Right now, the three, while trying to work together, act more like unilateral news organizations rather than converged ones, says De Gregorio, the multimedia editor. Each news organization tends to think of itself first, and then, if it remembers, the other two. Currently, the television and newspaper voices dominate the convergence conversation, with the online operation looking for a place to fit in. For De Gregorio, a former TV executive producer, the three organizations resemble the legs of TV camera tripod. "We're a tripod with one leg not lockable," he says, referring to the challenge facing the smaller and less experienced online news operation.
The expectation is that eventually all three partners will contribute equally to the process. "It's not whose idea it is, it's who's in the best position to drive the story," that should determine who takes the lead, says Tribune managing editor Donna Reed. Meanwhile, the three news organizations strive to adopt a musketeer approach. But this one for all and all for one attitude is bound to find some bumps along the way.
"Convergence is a contact sport," Thelen says. "It happens one staff collision at a time." *
Aly Colón is on the ethics faculty at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida. He has worked as an editor and reporter at The Seattle Times.
