popular thinking

When I arrived at the Arizona Republic in the sweltering summer of 2001, convergence was the buzzword of choice around the office. Gannett had bought the big metro daily months earlier, and already owned the NBC affiliate in town. So why not find a way to leverage the power of the daily newspaper and the local TV news leader? We'd go on Ch. 12 and offer our expertise whilst promoting the paper, thereby selling more copies. They'd offer up columns or other tidbits in the paper. Seemed like a decent plan. Never really worked out as well as planned, though. For one thing, the Republic's circulation has continued to decline over the past five years, even though Maricopa County added at least 100,000 new residents (new readers!) each year. For another, the convergence thing never really took among most folks. 12 News mostly wanted Republic reporters only on the morning newscast in the wee hours, the one part of the day the station didn't have that many viewers! The directives kept changing. Reporters were expected at first to do the TV stuff on their own time, then had to try to factor it into the week without overtime. Some reporters had to audition. Others got asked to undergo TV training, all to no avail. One guy who fared well, though, was business reporter/columnist Brahm Resnick, who has become a regular anchor.

Anyhow.

I think of all of this as I read today's story in the Washington Post about newspaper companies feeling less and less cozy about owning TV stations -- or in the case of the venerable Scripps, the consideration of dropping all of its newspapers to focus on TV!

The media bidness continues to evolve in strange and mysterious ways.

But I continue to think there is a place for newspaper reporters on TV, radio, online and anywhere else they can go to spread the news about the news. You need to find readers wherever you can.

Labels: convergence, newspapers, TV