When Communications Corp. of America was in bankruptcy during the first half of 2006 and much of 2007, it did more than sort out its finances.

It made a major commitment to news, seeing it as the most reliable engine of growth for its collection of 17 small-market stations in Louisiana, Texas and Indiana.

While still in bankruptcy, it began airing news at its NBC and Fox affiliates in Baton Rouge, Shreveport and Alexandra, Lousiana.

And shortly after emerging from bankruptcy a year ago, it added newscasts at its Fox affiliates in Tyler-Longview and Waco, Texas.

Key to the news explosion was a commitment to file-based content management and the interconnection of all the stations with a 50 Mbps fiber network, FTP sites and high-speed Internet links.

The fiber path ties together most of CCA's stations, including four in Baton Rouge (full-power NBC and Fox affiliates and two low-power outlets), a Fox-MNT duopoly in Shreveport, a Fox-MNT duopoly in Lafayette, an NBC-Fox duopoly in Tyler-Longview, the Fox affiliate in Waco and the Fox affiliate in Alexandria.

Five other stations — NBC affiliates in Brownsville and El Paso, Texas; a Fox affiliate in Odessa, Texas, and a CBS-CW duopoly in Evansville, Ind. — can tap into the network with high-speed (10 Mbps) Internet links, what CCA calls a virtual private network or VPN.

Chief among the benefits of the fiber network is the ability to centralize news production at two hubs. From Baton Rouge, CCA produces the newscasts not only for Baton Rouge, but also for Lafayette and Alexandria. And from Tyler, it produces news for Tyler, Longview, Waco and Shreveport.

Each market has its own crews and reporters that feed stories and video upstream to one of the hubs, where they are incorporated into a complete newscast customized for the market.

The evolving interconnect is primarily the work of an in-house team led by Sheldon Galloway and including two chief engineers who double as group technologists — Louis Strowger at KWKT Waco and Ernie Hartt at KTSM El Paso.

In this interview with TVNewsday, Galloway says that although the impetus for the interconnection was news, it was soon discovered that it could transform operations and improve efficiencies in other ways.

An edited transcript:

How did the fiber network come about?

We wanted to launch news cost effectively at our stations knowing that there was less and less syndication coming down the pipe and that we needed to get into the news business. So [CEO] Steve [Pruett] asked me if I had any thoughts on how we could do it and I said, yeah, we've got some ideas. We put them together and got the go ahead.

We started in Texas and later added some missing interconnectivity between Longview to Shreveport. The next thing you know we're wired across most of Texas and all of our Louisiana stations.

The original vision was to produce news for other markets and to share news stories that had commonality across the markets. For instance, during Hurricane Gustav, our stations in Longview and Tyler were showing shots of I-20 and telling people not to use it to head to Dallas because it was jammed. So there's a story in Tyler and Longview that definitely had interest for Shreveport and all the evacuees along the coast of Louisiana.

Tell me about the news hubs.

We still have crews in every market gathering the local content, but they send it to Baton Rouge or Tyler where the actual newscasts are produced and sent back to the stations for air. That saves you the production crews, the anchor team, the weather meteorologists and the sports team.

Let me use Lafayette as an example. We have three people out there gathering content. They send it to Baton Rouge where they produce Fox News Lafayette Louisiana. You are producing the 9 o'clock newscast for substantially less than you would if you had to produce it locally with a live crew and facilities and talent of the same quality.

We are a little sensitive about this because the competition will say we are not local. But we are. All it is is that the person announcing it is not in the market.

And you are able to do all this because of the fiber interconnect?

Yes, but it's more than that. Not only are we hardwired between the stations, but each station has its own FTP site. We also have a central FTP site. So all stations can upload stories to the site and all stations can grab the content and use it. News directors list all the stories that they're actually shooting and developing that day on the shared site. It's another way of maximizing resources.

So you have the FTP capability on top of the fiber interconnect.

That's correct. And we have another layer on top of the FTP. We've created a VPN [virtual private network] by giving every CCA stations a 10 Mbps pipeline service. This allows our stations in Odessa, Brownsville, El Paso and Evansville to gather content and move stories back and forth more quickly than on an FTP site.

We are able to do all this because we're a file-based company. We try to be totally tapeless. We might run a little tape to ingest things, but other than that we pride ourselves on being a file-based company.

When did you make the move from tape to files?

Two years ago, using equipment made by Digital Broadcast.

What's does the FTP capability do for you?

More than anything else the system allows us to be mobile. A lot of our stations have laptops with broadband AT&T cards and and WiFi built in. So with our Sony XD cams and the Panasonic P2 cameras, we can shoot the stories, feed them directly into the laptops, edit them using the Canopus Edius software and then upload them.

To one of the of FTP sites.

Right. You can upload the story to the FTP server via the broadband card or a WiFi hot spot. We've installed a couple of hot spots in some markets that we're testing right now, but as you know you can also find commercial hot spots at coffee shops and places like that. The point is you can actually have something shot, edited and on to your next story in 15 minutes.

You can also reduce the number of live trucks you need because you're sending stuff out quicker. You're in a regular car. You don't have to worry about raising a mast, which you couldn't raise in a hurricane anyway. So, you're able to send stories in the middle of a storm as long as there's electricity around one of our WiFi hot spots or a cellular service.

So, do you foresee one day getting rid of your microwave trucks?

My personal vision is that live trucks eventually will outlive their usefulness due to the availably of G3 technology. The uplinking speeds are evolving and getting faster and faster. So there will come a time when live trucks will be obsolete. It's not here yet.

But you're saying that today your need for ENG trucks to send packaged stories is almost gone.

It would be pretty hard for me to justify a couple hundred thousand dollars for that. If I had a choice of outfitting a station with HD studio cameras or a live truck, I'd probably go with HD studio cams.

And you are using the system for distributing your syndicated programming across the group?

We use it for moving the content back and forth so we don't have to pay for an extra feeds in case a feed is missed.

I mean, are you downlinking everything at one location?

Well, right now, we're downloading at every single station. But I'm not sure that three years down the road we won't have two central sites pushing files out to all the other ones.

So why not do that today?

Because we are still in Hurricane Alley. So let's say we used Baton Rouge as a receive site and a storm comes through and knocks out the power. That would be a nightmare if we don't have enough redundancies.

We're still designing this as we move along. It's a living, breathing entity with increasing capacity. It's evolving.

What other applications have you found for the interconnection capabilities?

Well, we're combining all the Fox station promotions departments in Baton Rouge right now so that all the stations have the same look — the same logo design, the same on-air graphics, the same voice. All the network and syndicated programming will have the same branding. Wherever they are, people will know that this is a CCA station. We expect to have it fully integrated by the middle of October.

What about the news promotion? Will that be centralized?

The news department promotions still need to be done on an individual basis because you have proof of performance. You still have "Coming-up-tonight" promos based on your video footage versus, you know, "Today on Judge Mathis."

As you interconnect your stations, have you given any thought to centralcasting — that is, combining master control in one location.

We've given some thought to it, but I don't think we're there yet. We're always looking for efficiencies.

Let's talk a bit about the equipment you have on the street. You mentioned you have Panasonic and Sony cameras?

Yes sir. We're using the Sony XDCAM. That's the disc and we use the Panasonic P2 cameras with the cards.

Is it all SD gear?

No. The Panasonics are HD and SD. The XD gear is mostly SD, although we do have some Sony XD HD cams too, one or two per station. There are only two CCA stations that are currently full-blown HD from field acquisition to the studio.

Which ones?

KVEO in Brownsville was launched last September and KTSM in El Paso was launched just before the Olympics. Each was the first station in its market to go HD.

And they're wall-to-wall HD?

Well, not quite. The live trucks, for instance, haven't been upgraded yet to HD. I don't want to mislead you on that, and we are still using some SD cams in El Paso. But we're using only HD cams in Brownsville.

What are your HD plans for the other stations?

I have plans to roll out HD widely next year, but they still have to be approved by Steven [Pruett] and the board.

Other broadcasters have been experimenting with lower cost cameras instead of simply buying the expensive pro models.

Well, the Panasonics we're using are the smaller P2 cameras. We're pleased with the results and they run about $5,000 apiece.

And you said that you are using Canopus Edius in the field for editing, right?

When we bought the Digital Broadcast NewsBank system, we purchased Final Cut Pros to tie into them. Final Cut Pro is fine software, but it's really more than you need for news. So we also loaded Canopus Edius on all of our AP ENPS machines.

Is there anything else you care to add in here?

I think we're just beginning to scratch the surface of what we can do through connectivity.

Elaborate.

Long-form programming. CCA has begun producing a sports wrap-up sports show year-round on Sundays that we're airing across all the Foxes. We will be able to distribute over the fiber to everybody but KPEJ [Odessa, Texas], which will pick it up with the VPN.