NEWPORT'S NEW OWNERS, NEW FOCUS, NEW TECH

Newport Television, based in Kansas City, was founded last year when Providence Equity Partners purchased Clear Channel Television—56 TV stations in 24 markets—a division of Clear Channel Communications for a price that ended up at about $1.02 billion.

The new management team, headed by CEO Sandy DiPasquale, includes several important carryovers from Clear Channel Television. Among them: Michael DeClue, vice president, engineering, who had been with Clear Channel for 19 years.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY Contributing Editor Peter Caranicas, DeClue says he likes the idea of ownership and management dedicated exclusively to TV. “We're going to emerge a much stronger television group in the Newport context than we were in the Clear Channel context.”

And with the front-office changes behind him, DeClue, based at KOKI Tulsa, Okla., says he is focusing on the digital transition and getting stations ready for their eventual shift to HD news.

An edited transcript follows.

Why did you skip NAB this year?

Because everything is so new here. The week of NAB I needed to be in Kansas City. That came first and that's where I went.

Describe how Newport is different from Clear Channel Television.

The focus within Clear Channel was never on the operation of a television group. We were routinely categorized on the pie chart as “other” because we were such a small part of an enormous radio and outdoor media conglomerate.

Now you're a pure TV station company.

Absolutely. And we have a management team whose focus is laserlike on the operation of the stations. Things that would have been impossible to dial into in the old Clear Channel world are going to receive scrutiny, attention and better management.

What is your management role?

Besides all the technical things that need to be done, one of my primary jobs is capital management for the group. But that is much more of a consensus thing within Newport style of management than it was at Clear Channel.

Now that change from Clear Channel to Newport is behind you, how are you moving forward?

We're completing our plans for the analog-to-digital transition. A few of our stations—by far a minority—are going to have to do another channel change. It's a big deal and we need to take care of that. We're also adopting a digital file structure and digital workflow. We need new cameras. We still have some legacy tape decks that have got to go. And we want to move closer to doing high-def news.

Do you have a timetable for these changes?

I do, but I can't talk about it. It's a competitive sort of thing. But you can imagine what we're going to do. We've got flagship stations in Cincinnati, San Antonio, Salt Lake and Jacksonville. These are the markets that we would address before some of the other markets.

Are any of your stations doing HD news at the moment?

They're not. But we will be doing HD news very shortly.

Which stations will be the first?

Well, again, the larger markets would be the ones that would be candidates for that. There's a lot of infrastructural kinds of things we need to do. One of the side benefits of getting rid of legacy tape workflow is that you become more HD-capable. Doing HD is not just one box. It's a whole series of capabilities that have to be added, and you have to have all of those pieces in place. You don't just want to go ready, fire, aim.

How automated are the news operations among your stations?

It varies widely. Some of our stations from The Ackerly Group [purchased by Clear Channel in 2002] were early adopters of the ParkerVision system, which is now the Grass Valley Ignite. In some of our other markets, we are using Ross equipment with Overdrive automation for our switchers. And we're also moving forward with the Bitcentral Précis file-based news management system. These are all highly automated, digital systems. We want make these things pay for themselves as we adopt them.

We also have an engineering group here in Tulsa, where we build our own proprietary automation equipment, and we also assume responsibility for IT for the group, including management of our WAN, e-mail, anti-virus programs, etc.

So you also buy IT equipment?

Yes, and we adapt it to the video world. That allows us to apply some economies because IT equipment is commodity equipment. For example, we use the Hewlett Packard ProLiant D360 box as a server in traffic and accounting, in master control for ingest, and as a playout box. Broadcast equipment is not typically warrantied for three years like IT equipment is, plus you get HP support. They can have hard drives here in nothing flat.

With all the additional bandwidth that DTV affords, and all the possibilities for new applications, how do you determine how you will use it?

That is really a management question. We want to operate in a conservative and flexible manner so that when the opportunity presents itself we will have the room to adopt a particular service or feature. There are many different kinds of things out there. The simplest one is just adding another subnet, another little network, to a secondary stream.

Aren't you already doing that in some places?

We are. We have either CW or our own channel that we're distributing, from what we call the Variety Television Network. We're distributing it out of TulsaTelevision Operations Center. It's a network operation in the IT sense, distributing content via our WAN. It's kind of like training wheels to help television stations figure out how to take advantage of and sell these little networks on secondary channels.

Do you see potential in the subnets?

I sure do. There's every variety of channel out there that you could imagine, and they can't all get on cable, but if they can make a deal with a local broadcaster they can get access to that particular market.