News producers and account executives at Gannett TV stations take note: your new boss wants you out.

No, Dave Lougee is not planning wholesale layoffs. He simply wants more station employees on the street finding new advertisers and collecting video.

It's part of an evolving strategy for keeping TV stations viable in a media environment that is offering consumers more and more choices.

Lougee succeeded the retiring Roger Ogden as president of Gannett's 23-station broadcasting division last July.

Lougee joined Gannett from Belo, where he ran 19 TV stations and four cable news outlets as executive vice president/media operations.

He is one of those rare station group chiefs who came up from the news side of the business.

He was a news director at three stations, including Gannett's KUSA Denver, before taking over as GM of Belo's TV and cable news operations in Seattle-Tacoma in 2000. He later moved into the Belo corporate ranks.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY Publisher Kathy Haley, Lougee talks about other parts of the Gannett strategy—stations and newspapers working together on the Web to exploit their combined 100-market footprint, a joint venture with Tribune that is creating new community sites, preserving extra digital spectrum for mobile broadcasting and developing a “true” interactive relationship with viewers.

An edited transcript:

You've been in charge of Gannett's TV Station group about six months now. What is the most interesting challenge you've encountered so far in your role there? 

There have been a number of them, but one of the fun challenges has been taking advantage of the opportunities that technology and other tools are providing us to re-engineer the stations, both on the content and the sales side.

Re-engineer them?

As the business climate changes, it's imperative for us to evolve the way our sales and news operations are structured. It's not a black-and-white situation and it won't happen overnight, but we need to evolve it.

How are you re-engineering sales? 

We have been evolving to focus less on transactional sales and more on concept selling. What we are doing now is accelerating that rate of change.

What's the difference?

With the ability to use our Web sites, mobile and other tools, we're able to now offer customers solutions that are more customized than just traditional 30-second spots. But to take advantage of that opportunity, we need to be structured well to do that. We need to consider what kind of talent we hire and what we pay for it.

Are you talking about cross-platform selling?

That's part of it. But there's a parallel, very similar content issue. We have the Information Center concept that we are rolling out across our newsrooms in the newspaper and the broadcast divisions.

These are 24/7 operations that are publishing and broadcasting out. But they are also taking advantage of the return path in.

Internally, we are training photographers on the newspaper side to shoot video. The broadcast division is providing that training, and, now, we're sending TV reporters to that same training. It's to improve the amount of content and journalism we can provide.

Are you talking about this idea where, instead of sending out a crew to shoot a story, you send out a reporter who does his or her own shooting and standup? 

It's not that everyone becomes a one-man band. Newsrooms have reacted to that. They feel it means a reduction in quality. But what's the definition of quality? If a newsroom is only sending out eight reporters on a given day, what happens if they re-engineer the workflow and can send out 24 a day?

We're outfitting these reporters with $7,000 high-quality HD cameras. We had a reporter from a TV station just accompany a military operation to Camp Phoenix in Afghanistan.

That's an example of where technology is letting us go. Are we a better newsgathering operation with 20 $50,000 cameras or 100 $7,000 HD cameras?

We've got our newsrooms actively, intellectually engaged in how to define quality journalism in a digital age, and how to utilize the tools available to us to get there.

How does it change the content?

Here's the discussion that I have at our TV stations. I might go in and ask the general manager how many full time employees work here? In the past, you might have gotten the answer, “150 people.”

Then, I ask the general sales manager: “How many account executives do you have on the street right now? Not people back at the station clearing orders. People on the street, selling solutions.” He might say, “Six.”

And then I say, “How many reporters do you have out getting stories, not somebody producing something | More …