Hearst-Argyle Television is among the elite band of TV station groups defined by the high quality of its TV journalism.

Twenty-seven of its 29 TV stations air news and, in any given book, as many as 23 may be ranked either No. 1 or No. 2 in their markets.

And those stations reap more than their share of industry awards. Just this year, WTAE Pittsburgh won a Peabody for an investigative series and WBAL Baltimore captured two Murrows — one for a documentary, another for a news series.

Overseeing it all from corporate headquarters in New York is Fred Young, senior vice president of news.

Young has his own list of honors and accomplishments, which include RTNDA's First Amendment Service Award and the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters' Broadcaster of the Year Award.

It is also a distinction that Young has spent 46 years with a single company in a business where job hopping and market climbing is the norm. More than half of those years were spent at WTAE, learning the business and TV journalism from the bottom up.

In this interview with TVNewsday Editor Harry A. Jessell, Young shares some of the accumulated wisdom of those 46 years. He says that TV news is undergoing fundamental changes. The Web is not only providing another outlet for stations, but changing the way it is being produced and the urgency with which it is distributed. And, he says, day of the star-driven newscast is coming to an end.

An edited transcript:

What's the big challenge facing TV news these days?

It's maintaining the impact, the significance, the importance and the value of local television and making sure that the people who are out there who will all soon be receiving digital signals, many of them on high-definition television sets, understand that the best most comfortable source of local news should be your local television station supplemented the newer platforms of the Web and mobile. My goal is to make sure that we continue to play a very viable role in informing local communities.

But certainly young people aren't going to TV stations for news. How do you keep TV news relevant to them?

When there's a big story, it becomes relevant to everybody. Our challenge is to keep it relevant every day. You know, we're often accused of doing too much crime, but crime is relevant because crime, if it impacts you, is important. At the same time, we have to do investigations and we have to talk about politics and government.

The Web and mobile don't have communicators per se. The Web offers you video in snippets and, if that's the way you want to watch it, so be it. We still believe that the people who present the news, write the news, produce the news and organize it for the viewer are critical to the process of understanding the news.

Economically, the news is all bad. Station groups are feeling the pinch. How is that affecting the news business?

It's impacting the amount of people we can hire. The economic pressures to maintain the bottom line and to keep the stockholders happy have resulted in a lot of people losing their jobs across all forms of media, but I believe that as the economy comes back — and it will come back as it has in the past — we'll begin to refill our work force, but we'll be smarter the next time.

Smarter how?

As you reported in TVNewsday a week or two ago, we won't be paying outrageous salaries for people to single task. We'll be looking for people who can multitask, who are willing to get out and, to use an old cliché, get their fingernails dirty and to report and to produce and to work the 24/7 schedules that our business requires. I just think we're learning to be smarter.

Are we going to see the end of high-priced anchors, who don't multitask, who sit in the studio and read news?

I hate to stereotype because there are some great anchor people, many of whom work for us. But the ability of anchor talent to just leverage one station against another is going to end very soon because this is going to be all about what we can do within our communities and not what we can do to keep a small group of people happy.

The great anchor people of the past are just sort of leaving the business and we all know who they are. As news becomes more ubiquitous, I think that the team concept will be more important than the individual player.

Every TV station will look more like the Tampa Rays than the New York Yankees. As Warner Wolf points out on Imus every morning, the Rays have one of the lowest payrolls in the major leagues.

And the Rays could win the World Series.

Absolutely. News is going to become a team-driven product rather than an individual-driven product.

You're not going to spend as much money for the anchors.

We're going to have to redistribute our resources.

Where do you put the money that you save?

If it were up to me, we have to put it into technology because the technology is changing every hour. We go to meetings, we go to seminars, we have people come in, we have our engineering gurus tell us what we need to have. Then, then three hours later, somebody's telling us it's the wrong thing, we need to have something else because it's better.

We were talking about $25,000 cameras, then we were talking about $2,500 cameras, now we're talking about the $150 Flip camera. Pretty soon, we'll be back to the $25,000 HD cameras.

But we have to put it into technology, we have to put it into Web development, we have to put it into HD sets, we have to put it into HD conversion,

How are you integrating the traditional newsroom with the Web?

It's been an interesting process. The first few years, I think, were a little awkward because our Internet provider was a company in which we have a financial interest [Internet Broadcating] and a lot of the Web people worked for them. Now we have our own people overseeing the Web people so it's far more of a team effort.

We're spending a lot of time internally with adding people and developing systems. We're working on retooling and refining our newsrooms so that the system, the work flow — the Web guys have a lot of fancy phrases for this — can turn out news all day long like we did in 1970 when we had a radio and TV sharing news departments.

So in a sense you're going back to all-news radio.

We're going back to all news radio and, oh, by the way, there were times in those days when radio and TV combined didn't work. But news on demand for the Web produced by broadcast newsrooms is working.

As you talking about physically changing the layout of the newsrooms?

Not so much the layout because the layout is just desks and computers. It's more about equipping people with the tools that allow them to get the news on the air when it happens, not a couple of hours later. You see it on our air all day long. When the big story hits, we no longer wait till 6 o'clock. It's like who's going to be the first one to break in with the a hostage situation. Who's going to be the station that gets on the air to make sure that we know that the hurricane is coming or that the tornado is bearing down. We're going to stay with it as long as you have to and at the same time we're pumping it out for our television station, we're pumping it out for the Web.

You have four stations airing HD news now, right?

Correct with several more to come in the fall.

Do you get a ratings bump from HD news?

In some, we've seen a bump and, in others, we're not so sure. But I think what I can say is that the viewers know the good stuff and they're responding to it. It's going to be better for all our stations to be there eventually. It's hard to do 20 HD stations at one time. But there are ways to bump up to 16:9 and get some new sets, graphics and other things that will make it look almost as good as HD. We're working very hard to get there.

But you spend all this money on HD and there is really no measurable return on investment, right?

No. It's the strangest contradiction of the world. We all know that HD is the most magnificent way to watch a television program whether it's the Super Bowl or the helicopter shots of the fire in the Big Sur area.

But at the same time people are telling us that our lunch is being nibbled at by people who are presenting a similar product on a 15- or 17-inch computer screen. So, we're working our way though that because there is a contradiction there.

One of the complaints I hear about local TV news is the commercial load. What kind of commercial load do you put in these half-hour newscasts? It's something like 12 minutes in some places.

It's not 12 minutes at any Hearst-Argyle station. When I started in the business it was never more than 6 minutes. That was it. We do considerably more than that now, but I don't think we're overcommercializing our news. We'd love to have more business, not from selling more commercials, but from selling them for a higher rate.

How do you feel about the FCC's crackdown on stations' use of video news releases?

We're offended by it. I'm offended by it. We had an incident a couple of years ago where ABC inadvertently inserted about 10 seconds of a pharmaceutical assembly line into a medical story, a legitimate medical story, but forgot to say that it was provided by one of the big drug companies. You know, we and dozens of other affiliates had to file a response to the FCC. It was eventually thrown out and dismissed, but it's incredible that we're spending all that time responding to that just because somebody made a mistake and used 10 seconds of uncredited footage.

You saw the story about the Las Vegas station where the two anchors are sitting with the McDonald's coffee cups on their desk. Is there anything wrong with that?

Abso-friggen-lutely there is.

What's that?

What's wrong is that it's trashing our product. I mean shame on them. I thought that the day of the Atlantic weatherman was dead. We shouldn't be selling commercial product placement on our newscasts.

McDonald's built a brand on TV advertising. I would much rather see them run one of their glorious 30-second spots in a morning newscast than have two awkward looking anchor people sitting there with a coffee cup in front of them.

Portions of a lot of station Web sites are being sold to advertisers for advertorials. The lines between editorial and advertising are not clear.

The Web is the wild west. One of our Web guys caught one the other day. It was a pitch for a company masquerading as a consumer story. We killed it. So we are diligent in our own space and on our own turf, but it's harder to monitor than it is on TV.

Do you see that as sort of part of a never-ending battle? Is there going to going to be more and more pressure to break down the wall?

Yes, the answer is yes, absolutely. The other thing about the Web is that it conveys a lot of bad information. You know the Web can be news. When the latest JibJab parody of the presidential race came out last week it was a big news story. Everybody was playing it, everybody was laughing about it. But at the same time, people are sending around a column that Maureen Dowd wrote about Barak Obama on the Web and talking about it on talk radio or whatever, when she wrote no such column.

But that anything-goes attitude is part of the charm of the Internet.

Yeah, it is the charm of it, but we can't let that charm rub off onto our local TV news operations.

Is the network evening newscast ever going to change?

Eventually, I think it will. I think they'll hold on as long as they can. I want to be careful of what I say here because we have affiliates of all three networks. I see more ABC and NBC and on most days they are pretty good broadcasts.

I've really come to know and like Charlie Gibson. I'm really impressed with the way they've contemporized. I don't know that the old people who sit at home and watch it at 6:30 know that, but I think the answer is they'll eventually morph or change into something else. I don't know what that's going to be.

[Hearst-Argyle CEO] David Barrett had an idea several years ago of allowing us to do news at 10 o'clock and maybe tying it to some kind of a network newscast at 10:30 cutting primetime to two hours. But is it going to change? I just hope it doesn't end up looking like the second and third hours of their morning shows because they are really light and the news is so soft.

Why aren't the formats of newscasts at the various stations in various market more different? They all look pretty much the same to me.

We are trying to do different things, but because it's a business where you can't hide, when one guy does something and it works, everybody else tries it. You can be different on Monday and by Friday everybody looks like you. That's really what happens in our business. There are no secrets.

We copy each other so quickly because we live in a quarter hour world in a metered market. We put news on the air in the evening. At 8 o'clock the next morning, we know what we did in the first quarter hour, we know what we did in the second quarter hour. We either sit back and say, oh my god, I did well last night or, oh my god, why didn't I do well and we go at it again. We never think beyond the next quarter hour.

We may see incremental changes, but never anything radical.

When you see radical on TV, a lot of it dies. That's part of the problem. A lot of the good stuff the networks have done dies. I mean Nightline was radical and how many years did ABC stick with it to make it really work, 20?

Well I don't think networks or local stations have the patience to try anything for 20 years anymore. 60 Minutes worked 30 years ago. For whatever the reason, it's still working. I was thinking of that the other night. 20/20 is gone as we knew it, Dateline is gone as we knew it, documentaries are gone. I saw a documentary on Heidi Fleiss last night. What a piece of... . Did you see that?

No.

It was terrible. You know, this world is full of problems and they're doing documentaries on Heidi Fleiss. So explain to me why there were no documentaries on gas prices.

With all the competition in TV news coming from cable and the Web and mobile, do you see the day when there will be only one or two local broadcast newscasts in markets?

It could be. You know, I'm not smart enough on the business side to know that, but it could be. It could be just because of the competitive pressures and the cost of doing business, the cost of high def, the cost of equipment, the cost of people even though salaries may be evening out and leveling out a little bit. You still have to have people to do the kinds of things we do.

Is there anything else on your mind before we wrap up here?

I love this business. I worry about it and I think we do it really well here. Obviously, that speaks to the leadership of David Barrett. Despite the occasional iced coffee on the anchor desks, we respect our competitors, our peer groups. We don't take them lightly. We don't like being pushed around by government, but we've learned how to deal with it and respond to it. Who knows what will happen to the VNRs and all that other stuff with the new administration. We may be starting all over again.