2001 Batten Symposium Panel

"Convergence and the Community: All Bells and Whistles?"

Moderator Roger Fidler, director of Kent State University's Institute for CyberInformation, led a discussion on how media convergence is changing the face of news. The panelists - Gil Thelen, vice president and executive editor of The Tampa Tribune; Mark Hinojosa, assistant managing editor-electronic news at the Chicago Tribune; and Deb Halpern, assistant news director at WFLA-TV in Tampa - shared their frontline experience from the nation's leading converged newsrooms.

Fidler: Media convergence is one of those ill-defined buzz words that mean different things to different people. At one end of the spectrum are those who believe it means that all forms of mainstream media - newspapers, magazines, television, radio and online - are about to merge into an undifferentiated monolithic megamedia.

In this view of the future, readers, viewers, listeners, all become users who are continuously and interactively connected to pervasive digital networks.

The greatest fear is that media convergence will lead to the creation of a global electric news blanket, if you will, whose thermostat is tightly controlled by a consortium of giant, multinational corporations.

At the other end of the spectrum are those who see convergence democratizing the media by creating opportunities for more diverse voices to be heard and by breaking down the barriers that have tended to separate mainstream media from the communities they are supposed to serve. In this view, emerging multimedia technologies will empower nearly everyone to participate in the shaping and the telling of the news. The truth, as always, is undoubtedly somewhere between these two extreme views.

Fidler: Describe briefly the media convergence experiments currently underway in your news organizations.

Halpern: I oversee our reporting staff, working to determine what angle the story will take, who they need to talk to, and how the story will be presented on the air each night. I also deal with special projects - election coverage, the Super Bowl. In my special projects role, I end up spending more time working with The Tampa Tribune than in my other role.

We still have not reached the point where we have our reporters routinely writing stories for the newspaper. It does happen, but it's not an everyday occurrence. However, I think our special-project work with The Tribune is really where the heart of convergence lies for us at this point. We're taking a look at ways to get more bang from our convergence buck, so to speak.

Thelen: As executive editor, I'm more of a convener of the various conversations that need to happen to get this started, to keep it going and to be sure we're going where we need to go.

The major role I serve is shaping the vision of what it is we're trying to do and revising that as we go, because this clearly is a learning process. It's been referred to as an experiment, and I think properly so. We do learn things every day, which changes how we think about what we do and how we align resources. I serve as a troubleshooter, as a cheerleader and as an enforcer of the rules of the road.

Hinojosa: A lot of what I do is get people to sit at the same table. This is a metaphor for my life. I have broadcast on one side and print on the other, and I translate.

We have some people on TV who don't know jack about journalism. And I say, "We're concerned about how you're approaching that story." And they say, "Who the hell are you to tell us what TV is?" And that's what I do. I am the buffer in between these two, trying to keep both sides from tearing each other apart some days.

I often describe the relationship between the Chicago Tribune and WGN as being two really big trees that grew up in the forest next to each other. Though they're similar, their branches only touch in certain places. So I try to exploit the places where we touch.

Fidler: Has all this technology made it possible for you to connect better to the community? Has it enhanced civic journalism in any way?

Hinojosa: That's a hard question. I think we provide better journalism in the sense that the time between 5:30 a.m., when the paper hits the porch and the next cycle of news that you may see at nine o'clock on WGN, of course, can be filled in better. I think we can provide updates. We can advance a story. We can aggregate stories together for context, which I think is very valuable.

Thelen: We measured the community's perceptions of this partnership before we went into it and then recently remeasured it and found that approximately 35 or 40 percent of the market was aware of what was going on and basically approved. We also found there was not a concern among citizens that there was any diminution of citizens' voices, of sources, diversity of news and viewpoints.

We were very concerned about this, going in, and I think it's important that everybody pays attention. In a time of almost corrosive skepticism about the intentions and performance of the news media, we have to safeguard the multiple strings of information and diversity.

Our critics, I think, were right early on to say that this could degenerate into simply a huge cross-advertising campaign for the separate platforms. And I think it's very important to be sure that when we are referring customers to one another, it's for specific content and not simply for brand building.

Halpern: We started to get some negative feedback from our viewers and our readers: "Don't just tell me to buy the newspaper, don't just tell me to watch the television newscast. Tell me specifically what I will get in that other medium that I won't get from you."

So very early on, we changed our promotions from "Pick up a copy of tomorrow's Tampa Tribune," to "In The Tribune tomorrow, you'll see a school-by-school breakdown of every crime that's been committed in Hillsborough County." Or "Log onto TBO.com and we'll give you capability to e-mail your senator and complain about this issue."

Fidler: How interactive are you with your viewers and readers? Do you provide them with a way that they can get back to you?

Halpern: During the "Decision 2000" political season, we made it part of our coverage to solicit feedback, primarily via the Web. Viewers e-mailed us questions they wanted us to ask the politicians. We did polling on issues important to the viewers.

Some of you are probably familiar with the SelectSmart.com Web site, where you log on, answer a list of questions and it tells you which presidential candidate most closely matches your views. We created one of those for our very important U.S. Senate campaign, where every candidate, including all the minor-party candidates, posted their stances on all the issues and viewers could match their answer to that of the candidates.

All of that made it easier for us to keep our political coverage focused on what our viewers wanted to see versus on the agenda the politicians were trying to set.

Hinojosa: I think that our relationship with our users and our readers varies a lot. A lot of what people come to us for is our national reporting. So we don't get the real street level, "This happened, what does it mean?" sort of reaction.

A lot of the stuff we get back - and I filter a lot of the e-mail myself - is utility stuff. They go back right away and say, "I want to know about what happened on this issue, and I want to get into your archives and see what it means. I want to go back and read the story."

That's why we started aggregating stories and collections a lot more often, so people could have that context because I found little spikes going on. A new story would happen and people would say, "I want to read the old stories," so we started putting them together.

Fidler: Some journalists have expressed fears that the cooperation between newspaper and television staffs, as sort of the central tenet of convergence, may dilute news coverage and editorial independence.

Thelen: We found in Tampa that the thing that's easiest to do together is the big, breaking news story. Nobody owns that. There's no ownership. Perhaps the community owns that story.

And as you move up the media tree of enterprise and investigations, the harder it becomes to join hands because if the News Channel 8 investigative reporter has three months invested in an issue, when he and his producer come over to The Tribune and say, "Hey, we want you guys to be as excited as we are about this," the reaction is, "Say what?" And the same thing happens when The Tribune initiates a big project. It's very difficult to transfer ownership and energy from platform to platform with these more sophisticated undertakings.

Halpern: Absolutely there's resistance. I would say there are even more levels than what Gil is talking about. I think there are people who are not only resisters, they're saboteurs. And they will look for ways, if they think they can get away with it, to basically get convergence to derail.

What I have found is that spot news is a great example of where I don't think the voices are diminished at all. I think they are expanded.

The historic part of Tampa, for anyone who's been there, Ybor City, was literally on fire in the spring of this year. We had our traditional five or six TV crews out there, just like every other station. But because of our partnership with The Tampa Tribune, we also had access to five or six reporters on cell phones providing us information.

So we were getting information that no other competitor in our market had and were putting it on the air. In this Ybor fire, I got the cell phone of one of The Tampa Tribune reporters and I called him up and said, "Michael, can I put you on the air? We're wall-to-wall coverage on this fire. Can you share what you know?" And, as a print reporter, he didn't think he knew anything because there was no way he could come back to the print newsroom and write a story at that point.

I said, "Can you at least describe to me what's going on?" He said, "Well, they're evacuating this elementary school. Teachers are walking out holding the hands of little children as they try to get out safely, and parents are running up to grab their kids." And I said, "Wait, wait, wait, stop talking. Let me put you on the air."

He said he didn't know anything because he didn't have his full story yet, but television is so much process journalism. It's so much of the story unfolding right now. And the print reporters were able to help us tell a better story on how the story was unfolding than we would have been able to do with just our TV resources.

Fidler: All across the country, newspaper and television stations have been announcing staff cutbacks in their editorial departments. Is media convergence likely to be used by media companies as a way to achieve economies of scale, essentially having editorial departments attempt to do more with less?

Thelen: One of the important things we've learned is that convergence is more work, not less work. It is not a deal where you can take news you need to cover and do it with six fewer people because you create this new hybrid journalist, this one-person band who's got antennas coming out of his helmet and carrying all kinds of different cameras. That is a prescription for mediocrity.

There is a real tension here between the expectations of Wall Street and the realities of convergence on the ground. This is going to be a growing problem because the pressure is going to be to say, "Well, you've got to cover this city council meeting, why send both a broadcast and a print person?" And we're going to have to be more and more tough-minded and persuasive in explaining why you can't do that and preserve the kind of trust relationship you have with the community about quality, information gathering and presentation.

Hinojosa: If we could eliminate Wall Street for a year, we'd be a lot happier. We're squeezed constantly by this. It's almost like we're squeezed hour to hour.

A friend of mine has his rules of three Ws. Customers want what they want, when they want it, where they want it. I keep applying that to what we do, because we need to meet our readers' - our "friends'" - expectations for their news. If they want to migrate to getting their news on their Palm Pilot or getting their news on toast in the morning, for all I care, then I want it to be Chicago Tribune news. Because there is an expectation, I think, that news is trusted. We have 600 reporters and editors out there working for you. We give you something that you can believe.

If we diminish that, if we start giving you something that you think you believe or is just slightly better than what you get from Yahoo, then why go to the Tribune for anything?

Halpern: I think that right now we are using convergence really to supplement our coverage and rather than diminish voices, we're expanding voices. The Tampa Tribune chooses to cover things that we will never choose to cover. But because they are there, we have access to that information so we sometimes add that into our newscast.

There have been some economies. We now use their research department versus trying to do it on our own with our Lexis/Nexis, Autotrack, all of that. We're able to, as a company, buy access to a service like that so that we don't have to duplicate efforts or duplicate costs. So there are some ways to economize that don't attack your journalism.

Fidler: How realistic will it be to find people who can handle all these different skill sets and not become mentally ill after a few weeks of doing this? How do we prevent quality from suffering?

Hinojosa: I just don't buy this. At our newspaper, we don't take the sports columnists and send them to the city council. We hire people because of their strengths in certain areas. Now, am I looking for another round of photographers who may be able to shoot video? We're talking about two different skill sets but two different skills that complement each other and also, if used properly, augment each other. Some stories need motion and sound. Some stories can exist in two dimensions in a moment.

But I don't think that the one-man-band approach, the still photographer - and that was the idea they had originally, you understand - that photographers were going to go out, cover a fire and then do "spray and pray" with a video camera and drop it off with somebody to use as B-roll in the background while someone talks about a fire.

It was a dismal failure because it was seen as trying to get something for nothing from them. And so they'd tank. It's not what we're going to do. Because, once again, when you pick up the Chicago Tribune or The Tampa Tribune, you expect a certain level of quality. You can't throw that out. You can't ration that. It has to be there.

Thelen: It's reasonable to expect that a superior print reporter should be able to learn to write adequately for online and be adequate on a talkback on television. But the notion that we can create exemplary journalists across all of the disciplines is nonsense.

Halpern: There are a few people in our shop, and I'm sure the same at the Tribune in Chicago, who are supermen and superwomen. They look great on camera, they're very poised and could probably anchor one of our newscasts and be as good as a 25-year veteran.

Most print reporters that do a gig on television look really uncomfortable. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to bother our viewers as much as it bothers us. I know from talking with some of the editors of The Tribune who are friends of mine, they just sit and they think, "Oh God, four hours of editing this TV reporter's copy, I don't know if I can survive it." And yet, we have some broadcast reporters that the editors say it's a piece of cake to take their copy and make a great story. But those people are very, very few and far between .