Management says local news operation will remain local

In the interest of fairness, I e-mailed WEEK’s general manager Mark DeSantis yesterday, and asked him about the employees’ concerns about outsourcing our local news to Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Here’s what he had to say:

[T]he one point that seems to be the most vital to the viewers of Central Illinois is that the local news operation remain local. I have gone on record with the union and with the public that there is no plan and no proposal to move the news outside of our East Peoria facilities. We have invested millions to build a dual digital control room, outfit a second studio, purchased and installed digital cameras in the studio as well as cameras used in the field to produce 11 hours of local news each day. There is so much invested and so much news content to produce that it could not be moved to another entity. It does not make financial sense.

The local news operation here will remain local. Period.

According to published news reports and interviews I’ve heard, the troubling language that Granite Broadcasting (owner of WEEK) wants to insert in the contract is something called “jurisdicitional flexibility.” The employees believe that, regardless of current plans, this language will give the company the option of outsourcing the news if they desire.

So I asked Mr. DeSantis, if the company plans to keep local news operations local, why are they pushing for this “jurisdictional flexibility” language? What does the company hope to gain by including this in the contract? What are some examples of the types of things the company could or would do with this contract language?

DeSantis declined to answer, saying, “Obviously we cannot get into specific issues with regard to language proposals. These are employee issues and getting into specifics would be a breach of our relationship with the union. What I can say is that the proposed language is becoming industry standard and exists with units in many stations including stations represented by AFTRA. So there is nothing in the proposal that would be new to the union representing the WEEK/WHOI newsroom. It is, understandably, new to this unit and I understand that change is not easy for employees to accept.”

My take: To some extent, the news is always going to have to be gathered locally. If you want to get on-camera interviews with local newsmakers, you have to have someone in Peoria holding the camera and asking questions. If you want to cover local sports, someone has to be in Peoria attending the games and getting footage. In essence, you have to have some kind of reporting/newsgathering staff here locally, and you have to have some amount of camera equipment to support that function. But everything else — editing, voice over, and especially anchoring — can be done remotely, from a technical standpoint.

It’s true there has been investment in equipment and sets, but those can be moved. When Granite entered into a local marketing agreement with Barrington Broadcasting, owner of WHOI, they moved WHOI’s sets to WEEK’s studio, as well as their equipment. If Granite wanted to move the whole works to Ft. Wayne, they could pack up the sets on a truck and move them out to Indiana in a jiffy. The digital equipment could be repurposed to Granite’s other stations, or kept here for use as a production facility (i.e., creating commercials or other production services for hire). Even if they sold the equipment, any loss could arguably be covered by the decreased personnel costs.

The bottom line is that many local residents just don’t trust Granite Broadcasting. We’ve seen them move all their master control out of the area, resulting in job losses here. We saw them try to move the weather reports out of state for a while. We’ve seen the increase in technical glitches during the news programs. We saw them get rid of reporters when they brought WHOI into the fold. It’s hard not to be skeptical of their assurances that they’re heavily invested in the area and have no plans to move the local news operation in light of all these other actions that have hurt our local news coverage.

12 thoughts on “Management says local news operation will remain local”

  1. Maybe the local employees and local residents should see if the station is for sale and purchase it? I believe that the owner should have the right to do what they need to do to operate their business in a profitable manner. If the product becomes so bad then they will not have the audience watching it and they will not be able to sell ads to generate revenue.

  2. Basically, the “jurisdictional flexibility” in this case was a maneuver to put the local broadcast personnel on the defensive. Management using questionable tactics during a negotiation? Wow, never heard of that before.

  3. It’s like a husband being caught with a pack of rubbers in his suitcase before a business trip: “I have no plans to actually USE them, it’s just that it’s standard practice for all the other traveling businessmen to carry them. And besides, didn’t I ASSURE you when we got married I wouldn’t cheat on you…”

  4. Why would you believe or trust anything a corporation says regarding its employees?

    Employees are no different to the corporation than paper supplies and or paper clips. They are a virtually unlimited renewable resource and that is looked at as an unavoidable cost of doing business and cuts into the bottom line of the the stock holders’ profits.

  5. And this is not radical theory either, for the eminent Seth Godin, king of the blogs and #1 marketing author, says the same. The day of obeying bosses is over. We must try to transition from being employees to being artists without resumes, renegades who invent their own rules and break them, wildcats who by God get things done, connections are made, and customers are astonished!

  6. P.S. Local news can be outsourced to India now. You can do remote reports by having local citizen journalists send in their JPEGS and MP4s, their photos and videos, and totally bypass a local corporate presence in gathering and delivering local news. The news reporter with a microphone in your face is now replaced by the iPad or Xoom cam in your space.

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