Part of Channel 11's past is WCN's future

WCN CAN SET UP NEW STUDIO
WITH WPXI-TV's OLD NEWS SET
Westminster College station receives
Channel 11's old news desk and other set elements

WCN/Titan Radio chief engineer Charles Chirozzi headed up a salvage operation at WPXI-TV this week involving the old news set at the NBC affiliate in Pittsburgh. Station management generously donated elements of the old news set and the former Fedko Fone Zone sports set to our new studio at Westminster College. Thank you, Channel 11!

Deconstructing the set was a tricky process. Some of the staff at WPXI tell us it was originally installed in the 1980s and updated in various ways over the years (we saw the mauve paint under the some of the veneer). However, the news desk and key components of the central section of the set are now housed at WCN's future studio on campus as is the Fedko Fone Zone set. The staff and management at WPXI were very gracious in donating these element as the station has moved into it's new home with it's new HDTV news set. It may have been Channel 11's old set, but it will make a extremely nice news set for our efforts at Westminster College, our Broadcast Communications major and our local programming efforts on WCN.












Here's a vid clip highlighting some of the efforts moving the news desk into the new WCN studio at Westminster. Students Ryan Hitchcock, Alex Hines, Thomas Miller and Josh Anderson were kind enough to lend a helping hand with some of the heavy lifting and difficult navigation through the McKelvey Campus Center.

KUSA in Denver Going One-Man Band

Gannett is gearing up for full-blown VJ model for it's Denver station. They've been toying with it under the label "BACK-PACK JOURNALIST." KUSA also has a reputation for great videographers with station and shooters there winning repeated NPPA awards.

The VJ model is cheaper and faster (but not always better). The gear is easier to carry now making the one-man band the wave of the future for bigger stations and now for newspapers as well as online outlets. According to the Denver Post, KUSA is "rechanneling" the workload and news product.

Gannett station pushing multitaksing by staff and ad interaction by viewers, by Joanne Ostrow, Denver Post.

The changing realities of the broadcast industry are arriving at KUSA-Channel 9.

Multitasking by newsroom personnel and the push to drive viewers to interact with advertising are new priorities, according to KUSA general manager Mark Cornetta.

A recent visit to Channel 9 by Dave Lougee, the president of Gannett Broadcasting Division in McLean, Va., underscored the retooling. Lougee, the news director at KUSA from 1990 to 1996, is traveling to Gannett stations this month to trumpet what staffers call "the new normal."

"In the old world, one person shot a story, another edited it, a third told the story. In the new world, one person would be reporter/photojournalist/editor and producer for TV and the Web," Cornetta said.

Some complain about it, some love it, he said. "People are picking up a camera who never have before."

In reinventing itself as a multimedia producer for TV and the Internet, the station is "moving to a more customer-centric focus, trying to understand what advertisers look for," Cornetta said.

Accountability, namely measurement of ad "click- throughs" on the Web, is expected by today's advertisers. The station is working to accommodate advertisers by steering consumers to microsites on the Internet. An experiment, modeled after one by Dish Network, involves integrating traditional advertising with extra online content. Think of it as popup ads on TV. Nationally, cable- and satellite-TV companies are investing millions in interactive features that let viewers take more control of what they watch. A major trend is "triggers" that appear during live programming that lead to on-demand content or to interactive screens to let viewers sign up for contests, order brochures or make purchases. Regularly scheduled TV commercials are embedded with a graphic overlay, or trigger, urging viewers to leave the program they are watching to view a product or service video. Interactive TV lets advertisers know demographic information about households.