Monday, February 16, 2009

WKYC/WOIO Announce News Video Sharing Agreement

Yes, we are aware of some big Cleveland market TV news we haven't been able to post until now.

Gannett NBC affiliate WKYC/3 and Raycom CBS affliate WOIO/19 are officially joining forces to share routine news video, according to the announcement posted today on WKYC.com.

The deal applies to video that would ordinarily have been shot by each station's separate crews, according to the WKYC story:

Videographers from both stations will participate in a pool coverage system to cover basic events of mutual interest, including news conferences, court hearings, groundbreaking ceremonies, and other pre-planned events.

WKYC VP/general manager Brooke Spectorsky weighs in, saying the deal between his station and WOIO "will allow both stations to shift more resources toward enterprise stories that support our individual style of newsgathering." (You could hardly find two stations with different "styles of newsgathering"!)

The deal mirrors earlier pacts between competing stations owned by the NBC and Fox networks, a chain-wide deal that has already started in Philadelphia and is expected to spread to other "owned-and-operated" markets. With the state of both the general economy and the TV news business, expect more of these agreements nationwide.

And yes, we predicted this around the first of the year, though we didn't have WKYC and WOIO tabbed as the two partners.

It makes sense that the first local news video sharing deal in the Cleveland market was between those two stations. We say "the first" not because we know anything else is brewing, but because of those aforementioned economic issues.

We'll elaborate on that, and more, later...but our apologies for the delay here.

As always, the Mighty Blog of Fun(tm) occasionally has to take a backseat to Real Life(tm), and we weren't able to get here until late this afternoon. And if we're away from being able to update this report...well, any long-time reader knows what is likely to happen.

We joke about it, but it's basically a reality in practice...if we're away from OMW, media news happens...

3 comments:

andrew727 said...

'Sign-Of-The-Times' Stations are seeing dropped revenue in news operations both because of the economy and the development of alternative news sources have made the profit pie even smaller. What hurts WKYC TV 3 is NBC's lackluster prime time programming is not a good lead into the 11PM newscasts. Meanwhile, Raycom's WOIO 19 in some senses, still feels like a UHF station in the backwaters...although this may change after analog drops away in June. WOIO really needs a 'set' makeover, looks like 1980's retro. In all of this, there will be more jobs lost as stations continue to trim where possible.
- Andrew, MALL727.net -

Mike Golch said...

I guess that means that there will be some unemployued videographers soon.

fanofgrendel said...

This is great if the stations use the freed resources to cover more events, but if the resources are just cut, it sucks.