Feeding the Beast: The 24/7 News Cycle
by Deborah Potter

Anyone who's ever worked in TV or radio news knows all about the daily need to "feed the beast." But times have changed and most stations don't have to do that any more. Does that sound impossible? It's not-for one simple reason. These days, broadcast newsrooms have to feed lots of beasts.

Every weekday at KGO-TV in San Francisco, in addition to the four-and-a-half hours of news the station produces, there are three-minute morning and midday webcasts, "abc7news-to-go" for cell phones and a 24-hour "Weather Now" channel to update. And that's not all. KGO also puts out a five-minute headline and weather package that's updated every four hours for Outdoor TV screens at gas stations, plus assorted desktop alerts, e-mail newsletters, podcasts and blogs. How on earth do they do it?

"It really is all about thinking differently and being web aware," says KGO news vice president Kevin Keeshan. "We're leveraging the same content over multiple platforms."

Keeshan insists that his station's transition to this brave new media world has not been traumatic. But adding more outlets for delivering news does mean that newsrooms and their staffs have to change, by learning additional skills, adjusting the workflow, and adapting to new demands.

"The revolution is here right now," says Jacques Natz, director of digital media content for Hearst-Argyle Television. "The learning curve for everybody is still vertical."

News managers who've been scaling the digital learning curve for a while say the best way to get started is to jump right in, but at the same time they advise going slowly at first. Some staffers are bound to resent or resist the demands of new media, especially if they believe they're just being asked to do more work for the same pay.

Take advantage of the "herd mentality" in the newsroom, suggests Kirk Varner, VP and news director at WTNH-TV in New haven, CT. "If you get a couple of early adopters in your newsroom and they are successful, you can bring people into the fold," he says. WTNH introduced news blogs on the station's website at the beginning of 2006, but Varner says he deliberately made it a "soft launch." Instead of requiring all reporters to begin a blog at the same time, Varner found software that was easy to use, showed the staff how to do it and let them proceed at their own pace.

A few reporters jumped on the blog bandwagon immediately. Within nine months all of the station's on-air staffers were blogging at least once a week and sometimes more often.

Motivate the staff to see the web as a positive, not a negative. "From my point of view, the website has added more energy and opportunity to our overall news operation," says VP and news director Maria Barrs of KDFW-TV in Dallas-Ft. Worth. "The website generates content we put on TV and vice versa."
At WJHL-TV in Johnson City, TN, news director Christine Riser encourages her staff to look at the Internet as a way to reach a wider audience with information that wouldn't fit in their TV broadcasts.

"I had to help people understand that the web gives you more room, another outlet for all that information," she says.

To encourage reporters and producers to use the web as an outlet, KGO created a regular online feature, "The Back Story," where staffers can share background, research, and portions of interviews that weren't used on the air.

The newsroom's success depends on its ability to change with the times, says KIRO-AM news director Ursula Reutin.

"Not everyone is comfortable with it," she admits. "It is an adjustment period."

But Reutin believes her staff has more than one incentive to file for the web. "It gives more people an opportunity to hear your work, and who wouldn't want that?" she asks.

In addition, the station's website prominently features photos of its reporters and anchors along with their stories, so they're no longer faceless voices to their listeners. "It raises the profile of each person," Reutin says. "In that way, it's a reward."

Another key to helping the staff adjust is making new requirements seem familiar. At KPNX-TV in Phoenix, the Arizona Central website is considered "a show."
The web producers attend editorial meetings along with the TV producers and they all discuss what stories they want for their various shows. Just making use of the same terminology kept the web from being seen as a foreign concept, says news director Mark Casey.
In the same way, he says, the need to update the web frequently is a kind of back-to-the-future experience for anyone in TV who ever worked in radio news. "Now when there's breaking news," he says, "the first platform to put it on is the web."

Staffing is obviously one of the biggest issues newsrooms face when moving to a multi-platform environment. "The greatest challenge is finding ways to do things with the existing people you have," says Riser, whose Media General station shares a website- TriCities.com-with the co-owned Bristol Herald Courier newspaper. The website has a few dedicated producers, Riser says, but "every person in the [TV] newsroom is not just responsible for one thing, it's six different things." Anchors write webcasts, station photographers shoot still pictures for the newspaper and reporters file stories for television, print and online.

Hearst-Argyle's Natz advises managers to "consider how you can change people's jobs to make them more efficient so they can operate on multiple platforms."
When he served as news director at WTHR-TV in Indianapolis, Natz created a new position and hired a former intern to write for both the morning news and the web. And whenever he had an opening, he looked to bring in someone who already had digital experience. "If you're a reporter, blogs ought to be part of your world," Natz says. "If you're a photographer, know how to push video onto the web and not just into a package."

At KPNX, cross training has made it possible for the station to produce more news on more platforms, including a three-minute web update or "I-Cast" six times a day. In seven years, without adding any staff, the station doubled the number of people who can edit video, all of which is now server-based. "We've had people go through multiple trainings and follow-ups and slowly brought them along," Casey says. Today, all KPNX producers can edit and post video to the web. About a third of the reporters on staff can manage rough-cut edits. The station also has found ways to consolidate jobs. While a TV newscast may involve three people-a producer, writer and editor-KPNX's webcasts are produced by just one person, who writes the copy and also cuts video. "Technology has helped us flatten the workflow," Casey says.

Filing for the web is no great burden, says KGO's Keeshan. Anchors only have to sit on the set an extra 15 minutes after the newscast to record a webcast. Reporters can e-mail updates to the web team while driving from one location to another. "It doesn't take them away from what they should be doing," Keeshan says.

But the need to file multiple versions of a story for different platforms has led some newsrooms to change the way they make assignments. "We're more focused about which stories we go after," says Varner. "It's not doing more with less. It's different with the same."
At his station, reporters now tend to track a single story through the day instead of being asked to file a v/o-sot on one subject and a package on another. KIRO's Reutin has made similar adjustments and sets different priorities. "We're making decisions during the assignment process," she says. "We may not cover a B or C story to have time for more platforms."

At WRVA-AM in Richmond, VA, the staff has had to adapt to a different way of writing for the web.
"I've told them to write for radio the way you talk," says news director Deanna Malone, who also heads the Virginia News Network. "Online, they can't be as informal so that's been an issue." Malone also says the staff sometimes has to be reminded that online, unlike on the air, spelling really does count.

With reporters now expected to file updates throughout the day, WJHL's Riser says that newsroom communication has improved. "When it works well, they're talking back and forth, giving producers information and letting them post it online."

Morning meeting discussions are different in a multi-platform newsroom, as well. "Our morning meeting started with a look at the web," says Natz of his former station, WTHR. "With traffic starting to peak on the web at 9 a.m., it's important to talk about that first." The nature of the conversation is different, too. In addition to deciding what stories to cover, morning meetings now also focus on which stories should be available for download as a podcast and what interviews might be streamed online. "It's adding one more layer to juggle and fit into your routine," adds Keeshan.

As expectations change, so do the tools needed to do the job. At a minimum, multi-platform stations routinely equip all reporters with laptops and wireless cards. At WTHR, some reporters have "disposable" $150 digital cameras that can shoot 30 minutes of video. It's not the best quality in the world, Natz says, but it can fill the gap and give the station an edge on breaking news when a reporter arrives before the photographer.

KIRO radio armed its reporters with cell phones that have cameras so they can post photos of stories they cover online. Now, Reutin says, it's just a matter of helping them remember to take pictures. "When did radio ever think about pictures?"

At WTNH, a change inside the newsroom highlights the importance of the Internet. All producers were recently issued dual-screen computers, with one monitor for the website and the other for TV. "It's symbolic and practical," Varner says. "It keeps both platforms in front of them, so they are thinking on multiple platforms all the time."

Nobody ever said change was easy, but it helps to make things go more smoothly if news managers are enthusiastic about new media; their excitement is catching. "The Internet is the greatest thing that's ever happened to television news," Keeshan says. "We do good work and it gets to a lot more people." Thanks to the wider exposure of the web, Keeshan says, their work also gets results. He cites investigative reports into animal cruelty and government secrecy that led to reforms almost immediately after being posted online.
Keeshan also jumped into the new media pool himself with a news director's blog, where he explains coverage decisions and responds to viewer questions.

No matter where your station is on the path to multimedia, WJHL's Riser says there's no turning back. "It is not optional," she says. "You can be ahead of the curve or the ball's going to roll over you."

Newsroom Blogs

There's no one-size-fits-all approach to adding blogs to a station's website, but there are some basic questions to answer before you start. Among them: Who will be allowed to post? What will they blog about and how often? And how will you handle comments?

At some stations like KGO, staff blogs are focused entirely on news. The I-Team has the most active blog, where reporters often post the full text of their source materials and insights into how they covered a story. Other stations, including WTNH, allow their staffers' blogs to run the gamut from notes about upcoming events to personal reflections on such topics as their own bad handwriting and milestone birthdays.
"We read them," says WTNH news director Kirk Varner, "but nobody goes in and edits for content." Spelling errors do get fixed, he says, but that's about it.

Letting the staff have free rein online has been liberating, says Maria Barrs at KDFW, where one anchor has blogged extensively about her upcoming wedding. "Our on-air people have an opportunity to express themselves more personally than is usually possible within the confines of a newscast," Barrs says. "Everyone seems very enthused, and a lot of people are going way beyond what we expected."

KING-TV in Seattle, one of the first stations to make extensive use of blogs, actively solicits comments from its users. Anyone can post a reply, but the station warns users to avoid offensive language, libelous statements, copyright violations and commercial use. While the station doesn't screen comments before posting, KING does monitor its blogs. If a post violates the rules, it can be removed, and on rare occasions, a user's access may be blocked.

Some stations not only encourage all staffers to blog, they also host blogs for outsiders. Fox-owned stations like KDFW, for example, make it easy for people to set up their own blogs in a community section of the station's website.

In its terms-of-use agreement, Fox Interactive makes clear that it assumes no responsibility for the content. Barrs says the arrangement can be uncomfortable when bloggers post inflammatory comments but she believes it's been a net-plus for the newsroom.
"We've gotten a number of good stories from our bloggers," she says. "We've had subjects of our stories post more information about their point of view, which has in turn led to new stories."

This article was originally published by RTNDA Communicator magazine, December 2006.