AT RAYCOM, GETTING THE STORY COMES FIRST

Like other station group technology executives, Dave Folsom has a lot to do these days.

As he discussed last week in Part I of this two-part interview with TVNEWSDAY, he is working hard to insure a smooth transition to digital broadcasting at each of the 42 stations that Raycom now operates.

But here in Part II, Folsom says that his priority is news, making sure that the 27 stations that produce news have all the tools they need to be the best they can be. And, to him, being the best means producing more and better stories, not racing ahead with HD.

An edited transcript follows.

What is Raycom's goal in news, and what are you doing to make it happen?

We're expanding news by increasing the number of hours and, luckily, the technology is allowing us to do that without having a proportionate increase in staff. Years ago, if you added another hour of news, it meant an enormous increase in staff—more photographers, more producers, more equipment, more everything.

But because of the way that news is created nowadays, with more dependence on technology, expanding news has a minimal impact on some of the fixed costs and I would consider people among those. That's a good thing. So, in every one of our markets, we're going out of our way to increase the number of hours of news that we create and deliver to our audience.

What are some of the things you are doing from the technical side?

As of this year, every one of our TV stations will have converted to nonlinear editing using regular desktop equipment, not specialized equipment. It's nonproprietary hardware. It allows us to have just about anybody be an editor at any time. Some of it is relatively simple.

To give an example, we have an anchor at our station in Savannah [Ga.], Mike Manhatton. He was driving home and he saw an automobile accident and shot it using a home video camera. He went home, loaded the material on to his little laptop, edited it and FTPed the result to the station. That is a real life story. That kind of capability wasn't available years ago because hardware was very expensive and it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today.

Bitcentral just announced that you are using its Oasis file-sharing system. How does that fit in?

Are you familiar with how Napster or how BitTorrent works?

I'm familiar with Napster?

The way that worked is if you were looking for a piece of music, you'd hook into the server and it would automatically set up a session between someone who had that music and you. Then it would automatically download it to you. It was a peer-to-peer system, meaning that it established downloads from one peer to another. You didn't even know who that peer was. You really didn't care. You got your piece of music.

Now, as it turned out, it was illegal because all the music was copyrighted. Nonetheless, the concept was good. So we've set up a peer-to-peer sharing network among all of our 27 news stations.

Each of the stations has a server, and we have a big server out in California where we collect low-bandwidth proxies of every news story from every station along with the metadata, scripts and descriptive data.

Now, if I sit down here at WSFA in Montgomery [Ala.], or I'm up in Cleveland at WOIO—it doesn't really matter where I am—I can get on a Web site and look through the stories from all of the stations on the California server and download whatever one I want directly from the station that produced it.

Now you have that story on your server. You drag it into your nonlinear editor. You make some adjustments or change the voiceover and you've now created new content by sharing.

We have a strategy to own stations in adjacent markets so we have, for example, Toledo and Cleveland, we have Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Baton Rouge, we have Tyler, Texas, and Shreveport. I could go on and on.

But the point is the news that happens in between the markets has appeal for both markets. There's a tremendous amount of content that is valid and relevant in more than one place.

For example, we had those tornados that went through Enterprise, Alabama. That was a big story for a lot of our stations. We were using our system to share content between those stations. We weren't reinventing the wheel. One or two stations were shooting it and they were sharing it with the others.

How long have you had this up and running?

Since January. Bitcentral had provided this for CBS and NBC, but the cost of that system was out of sight. They came up with a much simpler, less expensive version of the same thing for TV groups. The NBC O&Os were the first one to get it and we were the second.

If you want more of a perspective on it, you can talk to the folks at the NBC O&Os. They've had it in place for at least six months. They love it. They're using the hell out of it.

Let's talk news gathering. You have embraced the Panasonic P2 for ENG, right?

Yeah and we're increasing the number of cameras. The good thing is the P2 equipment is getting much less expensive.  

We're increasing the number of cameras at each of our locations by buying a mix of expensive, traditional style cameras and less expensive handheld style cameras.

We're doing that not to save money as much as to be able to afford having more cameras. Before, a station might have had nine cameras out in the field. Now, we may have 15 or 16.

Getting back to what I was telling you earlier, our goal is to create more material because we're increasing the amount of hours that we're broadcasting and we're increasing the story count.

But doesn't having more cameras in the field cause you some maintenance headaches?

I'll be a wise guy for a minute. All this equipment is new so there's never a maintenance problem. But, seriously, this equipment is free of moving parts so, in theory, we should have less maintenance.

What camcorders do you have?

We're using Panasonic's seven hundred [AJ-SPC700] camera as our larger, traditional camera. It accounts for roughly 30 percent of our cameras.

Roughly 65 or 70 percent are the smaller 200 [AG-HVX200] cameras. Going forward, I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, but there's some new technology that is going to be shown at NAB that we're going to invest in. It's an even smaller camera.

A growing number of stations are beginning to offer HD newscasts, but, in most cases, it's HD in the studio with 16 X 9 upconverted SD video from the field.

Our current strategy is to shoot in 16 X 9 standard-definition digital for spot and regular news and edit it in 16 X 9.

How come?

Remember, on February 17, 2009 the vast majority of our audience—maybe 70 percent or more—will be watching our pictures in SD even though we're transmitting HD. So, does it make a whole lot of sense on February 17 to necessarily have virtually a hundred percent of our material in HD?

I don't disagree that that's the ultimate goal, but like every other company, we have limited resources. You want to aim the resources where they're going to make a difference, and I want to make a difference in the amount of news that we provide and its quality in terms of what's being said. Whether it's in HD or SD has less impact on the audience than the quality of the content—how it's written, what it's about and whether it provides real value to our viewers.       

Another reason we're not doing HD from the field is the storage requirements. Whether it's the P2 card or whether it's the hard drive back at the studio, it takes four times the amount of storage to keep that material. In the short term, that isn't a very efficient use of storage space.

It will still look great on the air because, remember, it's going to be all digital and it's going to be 16 X 9. It's still going to be pretty spectacular video.

What's your schedule for rolling out local HD news across the group?

We'll start in the more competitive markets. I don't want to mention them because, frankly, I don't want to tell our competitors what we're doing.

There are a lot of competitive markets where HD is hot and one or two of the local stations are converting and we will be competitive in those markets.

It's not necessarily the biggest markets. Raleigh was one of the first and you know it's not a very big market. We'll make sure that we keep up with the Joneses.

So we should expect at least a couple of Raycom stations to go HD this year?

Yeah. A couple of stations will be going this year, in the studio.

Snell & Wilcox said that you have made a deal with them to use their Kahuna production switchers. That suggests that you're taking a conventional approach to news production rather than automating with something like Grass Valley's Ignite.

We've looked at Ignite and Parkervision before that. We've also looked at less dramatic, but similar, automation systems from Sundance and Ross.

We took a very serious look at it because people are one of the very few places where we have any control over the costs and they say that they can provide savings in that area.

But we decided that it is not flexible enough and it is not safe enough to insure that we could get on the air if something should go wrong. I don't want to throw a rock at any one of them because they're all good ideas.

We did talk to companies that had completely automated news systems. They'll all tell you to a man the exact same thing and, that is, when you're doing a regular newscast, a normal predictable stacked show, it works extremely well.

But we want to be in the breaking news business because that's where you provide something that nobody else can provide.

We just went through the big tornados I told you about where nine kids were killed down in Enterprise, Alabama. That was a wild and woolly news night. Nobody had any scripts, nobody had any plans. How do you produce a newscast on a night like that?

So you want to maintain full control over your newscast at all times?

That's why we've taken more of a conventional approach. It's not to say we're not making use of automation. We're very big believers in AP's ENPS/MOS protocol. We have MOS connected to all of our machines—robotic cameras, character generators, still stores, clip players. Virtually all of the internal mechanics of a newscast are connected via MOS so that we make use of automation as much as possible.

We're still doing a newscast with a relatively small number of people. I mean we don't have a cast of thousands in the control room.

Another key to HD news is being able to microwave HD video from the field, and that depends on the Sprint-Nextel upgrade. How is that going?

It's a very slow process. I won't throw a rock at Nextel. They have a tremendous bureaucracy and it's forced on them by the process that was set up by the FCC and the federal government. The government is subsidizing the cost of conversion and so every nickel, dime and quarter is triple and quadruple checked.

The process just got bogged down right from the beginning and it never really recovered. It isn't so much Nextel's fault as it was a little bit of naiveté and thinking that broadcasters would all act as a unified body, which you and I both know was never going to happen.

Now Nextel, to their credit, is trying to streamline the process, but you know their hands to a certain extent are tied.

Will they make  their deadline?

Oh, they've blown through the deadline. The deadline was September of 2006.

But they've got a final deadline this September.

That's the second phase, but they only have a couple of markets done and there are 200 markets.

We have a regular job to do every day, keeping up with their paperwork, getting all the quotes. And to make matters worse, the technology is changing at the same time. So if you had a quote from a year ago, it isn't the same technology that exists today.

It's really tough. I feel for the people at Nextel. I mean they're trying hard. Their heart's in the right place. They just want to get past this.

I'll give you the final word. Anything you want to add?

No. Everything I said are my opinions only and don't represent anybody else other than me and are not necessarily the opinions of Raycom Media or its officers.

You know, I'm full of opinions. Just ask me.