What to make of the TVification of The Hartford Courant… (based on little information)… and the new publisher (based on even less information).
The new publisher appears to be a TV guy more than a newspaper guy, and like his predecessor, a businessman rather than a journalist in temperment and experience.
He is way more articulate than his predecessor, that’s for sure, and apparently has the good sense to promote some worthy Courant people such as Rich Feeney. He has a vision, though how practical and doable it is remains to be seen. (And how much of it is original to him is another question.)
The idea of having one newsroom serve several media is not as new as Randy Michaels would want us to think. In Tampa, I think, there has been a continuous news desk at work for some time, coordinating coverage for TV, print and web. I don’t know how well it has worked. The New York Times has a lot of talented web/video people at work, too. Do these things make money?
At least Tribune is willing to invest some serious money in shaping a new facility and approach. It beats simply laying people off and trying to decide what readers will lose next.
How much sophistication to this merger — I mean sophistication in the kind of coverage and its quality — will be largely up to the combined newsroom, I suppose, and there has been no significant talk about who would run such a place. My gut feeling is that the Courant editors have the most nuanced news judgment, but how that would translate to TV (where nuance has never been a strong point) is hard to say. Maybe they will break it up as Tampa does: Fast (TV) and Deep (print).
I hope that Fox 61′s idea of taking advantage of The Courant’s brainpower and sophistication is not what I saw last night — both Dom Amore and John Altavilla being interviewed by Rich Coppola. Talk about duplication of effort and cross promotion.
They’ve come a long way back from the FCC cross-ownership ban, that’s for sure.
Stay tuned….
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You know, I kind of wonder about how much of an investment, in relative terms, Tribune is really making. The new publisher talks about a $6 million state-of-the art studio, but, from what I read in the Courant, $6 million is only a fraction of what WFSB and WVIT spent on their new places. Plus, I figure with the transition to digital, Tribune would have had to spend at least some of this money anyway.
While it is important to keep a positive anticipation to this, as some did for each and every other reduction, diminishment and diversion in recent years, it’s hard to ignore the evidence that they have put before the public. Every “positive” aspect is cast in how well this serves the Tv station — two new shows, broader coverage from print people for TV, eliminating duplication (uh, oh) — and maybe the web, the “maybe” coming from the truth that there are no new elements brought to the mix that weren’t there before the physical move of Fox to Broad Street. It’s hard to ignore the more subtle but still obvious signals that nothing is said about the paper; no one from the news side of the paper is referred to or quoted; no message was delivered to the consumers (the old readers) except that this is a good idea because we tell you it is a good idea and, in fact, that the print piece is not even worth mentioning. Imagine someone writing a story about, say, the Courant’s change in direction without interviewing the editor or being instructed by any assignment editor to go talk to the editor. Impossible. Or imagine if the editor chose not to let those basics get reflected. Pretty sharp signal, I think.
With the high professionalism of the remaining staff, we can comfortably hope that the momentum of standards and quality will continue — but it is crystal clear who is calling the shots now, whom you have to turn to for resources and who will make the decisions as to staffing and other resources.
Cross you fingers. Wishful thinking’s not much, but it’s all there is.
What’s there to be positive about? The newsroom has been sold off to a new tenant. The Chicago landlord has confiscated the property of the former tenants. Under the media consolidation plan, the Courant’s headquarters will be like Dr. Zhivago’s house after the revolution, divided up among several families. What are Courant’s editors supposed to say in response? They could say feebly, “Our house was too big for just us.” Or they could take a cue from “Dr. Zhivago”: “We’ll put up a partition and have our own door, and it will be like a separate newsroom. We’ll put one of those iron stoves in the middle room, with a pipe through the window, and we’ll do all our news gathering, our reporting, our editing, our laundry, our cooking, and our entertaining, all in this one room. That way we’ll get the most out of the fuel, and who knows, with God’s help, we’ll get through the winter, through the bankruptcy.”