Media Convergence: A Case Study of a Cable News Station

Media convergence is happening around the world. This study looks at the current operation of a cable news station that produces 2 media products in 1 newsroom. It also explores the theoretical foundations of value creation in online news by examining how online news is selected, packaged, processed, and distributed. Observational results showed that media convergence still has a long way to go. More important, this study found several divides between the Web people and the news people, between the managers and the reporters, and between the news department and the advertising department. This article suggests that convergence would go more smoothly if stations would integrate Web producers into the newsroom; if reporters were given incentive to do extra work or if their daily work load were adjusted to give them time to file for the Web; and if the sales people better understood the value of the online product. Bill Keller (2005), the executive editor of The New York Times, made a historical statement in a newsroom memo aimed at officially integrating the paper’s print and online newsrooms into one. His goal was to diminish and eventually eliminate the difference between newspaper journalists and Web journalists: Over the past ten years the newsroom of Nytimes.com and the newsroom on 43rd Street have been part-ners at a distance—separated administratively, culturally, geographically and financially . But in those ten years, the world has changed. The digital news operation is now grown up and strong, ready to enlarge its ambitions . We have concluded that our best chance of meeting that challenge is to integrate the two newsrooms into one. Although media convergence has multiple meanings, the integration of production for old and new media is what we mean, in this study, by media convergence. Such convergence is not just a challenge for The New York Times; it is a challenge for many traditional media who attempt to step in the Internet market. These news media face not only how to operate online news in a profitable way but also how to manage two medi