TAMPA, Fla. — In this sunny Gulf Coast city, photographers for the Tampa Tribune lug both still and video camera equipment to all assignments. That's because they're also working for a local TV station, WFLA Channel 8.
Extra sweat notwithstanding, the arrangement usually pans out -- though a newspaper photographer once didn't have time to switch cameras while shooting TV footage of a bank robbery in which a police officer was killed, and the paper was left with only a grainy video frame shot of the scene on Page 1.
So the journalistic future is still ironing out the kinks, even as the Federal Communications Commission considers a rules change that could make such collaborations routine.
The Tampa paper hasn't won a Pulitzer Prize in nearly 40 years, has a relatively modest circulation of 238,176 and often scrambles to keep up with a bigger rival across the bay. But by pushing the "convergence" envelope, it has become one of the world's most closely watched publications.
A steady stream of law- makers, professors, regulators and media executives pours through its slick concrete-and-glass newsroom each week, to glimpse a world in which the oil and water of television and print journalism are thoroughly mixed.
Three years ago, Richmond, Va.-based Media General Inc., the Tribune's parent, spent $50 million on a bold experiment to combine its Tampa paper with WFLA, its local TV station. The marriage, permitted under a regulatory exemption, marked the first attempt to put a co-owned newspaper and station under one roof.
As the FCC reviews a 1975 rule that usually prevents companies from owning a newspaper and TV station in the same market, the Tribune-WFLA combination has emerged as a test of what may become the media industry's next wave of mergers. The FCC is expected to vote June 2 on this and other media ownership rules. The agency's three majority Republican commissioners, two of whom have toured the Tampa facility, favor permitting newspaper-television matchups in all but the smallest U.S. markets, sources said.
The deregulation is likely to spur a race by owners of newspapers and TV stations, including New York Times Co., Belo Corp., Hearst-Argyle Television Inc. and Gannett Co., to buy one another or make strategic trades, enabling them to follow Tampa's example in search of greater cost efficiencies, advantages with advertisers or even new journalistic forms.
