WTVT, WFTS To Share Some News-Gathering Sources

The parent companies of WTVT, Channel 13, and WFTS, Channel 28, have agreed to pool news-gathering resources on some local stories.

Fox Television Stations and The E.W. Scripps Company announced today the formation of an in-house local news service that will supply stories to Fox Television's "Fox 13" and Scripps' "ABC Action News."

The newly formed "LNS" should be in operation in by May, according to Sharri Berg, senior vice president of news operations for Fox Television.

The operation will be staffed by employees from each station. The service, supervised by an independent managing editor, will provide video footage to WTVT and WFTS and then each station will decide how to use the footage.

"Having pool coverage is not so unusual; it happens in court cases and other events," says WFTS General Manager Rich Pegram. "This is for those events that we might all attend anyway, like a mayor's press conference, and we'd all get the same sound bite. By pooling this coverage, we free up people to work on our own enterprise stories."

Other stations in the market will be invited to participate, Berg said.

Fox Television and Scripps are starting similar joint agreements in Detroit and Phoenix.

"This is in no way designed to reduce the staff," Pegram says. "It's designed to generate more content and use resources more efficiently."

It also does not lessen the competition, he adds. "This will allow us to put more resources on signature pieces like investigative journalism."

In January, Fox joined NBC in a similar agreement for a pooled service in markets where both owned stations including Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Dallas and Washington, D.C. The NBC affiliate in Tampa is owned by Media General.

Berg says the first pool in Philadelphia is a success. "It started with suppling about five or six stories per day and now it's up to 30 a day," she said.