Tribune to merge paper, TV operations in South Florida

In a strategic move that could be repeated elsewhere, Tribune Co. announced Wednesday that its South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Miami-based WSFL-TV would merge operations, with the TV station's staff moving to the newspaper's Fort Lauderdale headquarters.

The move goes further than any previous newspaper-TV station collaboration, said Ed Wilson, new president of Tribune Broadcasting. He said the merger would give advertisers "a single point of contact" for reaching the South Florida market via print, broadcast and the Internet. It also would enable the company to more efficiently create editorial content, particularly in "lifestyle" areas, that could be used on all three platforms.

Chicago-based Tribune owns the Los Angeles Times and KTLA Channel 5. Since Chicago billionaire Sam Zell took over as chief executive in December after leading an $8.4-billion buyout of Tribune, he has talked about trying to wring more synergy from the company's same-city print and broadcast outlets. Previous Tribune management also favored the idea, but the goal proved elusive.

What goes around comes around...

I remember in Louisville, KY when The Louisville Courier-Journal, WHAS-TV and WHAS radio were all owned by the Bingham family and housed in the same facilities.

Then some government bureaucrats decided that concentrated “power” too much and ordered it broken up.

The C-J, which was a pretty decent, if leftist, newspaper, was sold to Gannett and now looks like a poor cousin of USA Today.

WHAS radio was sold to Clear Channel and is doing great as a news/talk station.

I don’t remember who bought WHAS-TV, but they are the local ABC affiliate.

What goes around comes around.

Remember the telecom breakup. Now AT&T has bought BellSouth.

re: The move goes further than any previous newspaper-TV station collaboration, said Ed Wilson, new president of Tribune Broadcasting.

No so, megahertz-breath! The Tampa Tribune, WFLA-TV and Tampa Bay Online, TBO, went through this in a big way several years ago. In trade-speak it's called ‘conversion’ and it's one of those ideas that looks good, really good, on paper but without management with the skills to make it work it just compounds the weakest points of all three organizations.

In Media General's case they built a magnificent new building and named it “The Newscenter”. Very impressive, but very poorly designed and built. Many of the shortcomings had little to do with conversion and deal to do with depending on editors, rather than the worker bees, to tell the builders how to design the building. Editors, for the most part, have been away from the work-a-day world of actually making the news available to the masses and have completely lost touch with what it takes at the lowest level to get a paper published, a newscast on the air or info on the Internet in a timely, and much more importantly a useful manner.

Our three operations were the first really big group to take a run at conversion and from the first day the rest of the trade treated those in charge of making it happen for Tampa, and Media General, were looked upon as experts in the field and became stars in the trade overnight. Hundreds of articles were written based on their ideas. Not their experience because no one had ever done it before, but their ideas, mostly hair-brained and borne of an over exaggerated opinion of themselves and how much they knew and how relevant their years of experience a decade earlier were to today's world of journalism. It was a debacle to say the least.

I was in the news photo part of the paper and for us it was one big comedy of errors. Things like thinking they could grab a still from a frame of a broadcast tape and use it instead of a photo taken by one of our 32 plus staff shooters. Wrong! The paper demands an image that is at least 2000 pixels on it's longer side. The biggest frame grab starts out at 500 pixels or so, before cropping! A video news guy does not see a news story or a breaking-news scene the same way a newspaper shooter sees it. They gave every still shooter a state-of-the-art video camera and expected, demanded, they provide both video and stills of every thing they covered. Though it was soon proved it couldn't really be done to the standards of either video or stills they kept on insisting and giving those who couldn't do it poor performance evaluations. Eventually they bought P&S digital cameras for the video guys, but then were shocked to learn that video guys had no idea how to shoot a good newspaper-worthy still shot.

I could go on and on, but won't bore you with the details. Anyone who wants to know more can feel free to email me and I'll share some of the funnier consequences of ‘conversion’.

No what it means is the scum slugs from the Sentinel and the liars from the Herald move physically closer to each other. They both are so desperate that in Miramar they are giving away newspapers to try to make it seem that they actually have subscribers.

Both papers are only good for two things lining bird cages and wrapping dead fish in. Thank God for SAFIE REVIEW. That way people can see what other newspapers say in the state of Florida.

Hey Mr McCain your fiengold act has 350 million dollars coming at you. What ever damage it does to you you can thank the guy in the mirror. GOD DEFINITELY HAS A SENSE OF HUMOR!

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The South Florida Sun-Sentinel and WSFL-TV will be sharing a roof. The company says cooperation between the two will help generate content that can be shared across print, broadcast and the Internet.