Orlando’s TV news departments have jumped into the pool — hoping to save a splash of cash.
Following a national trend, the newsrooms at WKMG-Local 6, WOFL-Fox 35 and Central Florida News 13 have startinged pooling their video on certain assignments. NewsBlues.com reports that the experiment began Tuesday, and it involves assignment managers at the three stations determining stories they can share video on. Then, the stories will be fed via FTP to the other stations at 11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. In theory, the deal saves stations money — instead of each sending a crew to cover a news conference, only one crew will go and share the video with the others. (You save money because you need fewer crews; or in the case of Orlando’s stations — you can cover more news because you have already have fewer feet on the street because of staff reductions.)
Interesting that the big dogs in town — top-rated WFTV-Channel 9 and No.2 WESH-2 — are not participating. Also intersting will be seeing how long this experiment will last in our ultra-competitive market.
Just last week, a similar pool agreement among several Atlanta stations started falling apart when CBS affiliate WGCL pulled out of the month-old agreement. WGCL thought the pool agreement was slow to respond to breaking news (and we have none of the around here, right?). Read more about the Atlanta situation here.
