Mediaweek Feature: Hard News for Hard Times

It was 1997, and the heads of two of Dallas' most competitive news-gathering operations -- The Dallas Morning News and ABC affiliate WFAA-TV -- had begun the first of what corporate parent Belo hoped would be many meetings designed to get the two working together.

>On one side of the table sat Stuart Wilk, vp/managing editor of the Morning News. On the other was John Miller, at the time the vp of news for WFAA. Though both had worked for their respective organizations for more than 15 years under the Belo umbrella, they had scant experience doing it together, even though all that separated them was a parking lot.

"We were both sitting at the table with our arms crossed," remembers Wilk. "WFAA was our best competition. Next to the Morning News, they are the best news-gathering team in town. So even where we started -- which was no history of cooperation, and a long history of competition -- it was probably [just as] difficult to break the ice [as] we imagined."

The executives were being asked to share resources for their Washington, D.C., news bureau, but both Wilk and Miller (who has since left Belo to pursue a teaching career) knew the process would not stop there. Soon, there would be news-sharing, back-office consolidations and group ad-sales initiatives. The proverbial wall that had separated the two operations for more than 50 years was beginning to crumble.

In a way, it had to. Belo's portfolio of assets was growing year by year -- today the company owns 19 local TV stations, 4 daily newspapers, 2 regional cable networks and 34 Web sites throughout the country. Convergence -- a buzzword that media executives throw about freely but rarely come to realize -- had become the new mantra. Never mind the fact that most of Belo's TV properties and newspapers had operated independently for most of their existence.

"You think the Berlin Wall was tough to knock down?" recalls Jack Sander, Belo executive vp of media operations and president of the TV group, whose office is in one of four immense buildings in downtown Dallas that employees have come to refer to as "the campus." "Knocking down a wall between a newspaper operation of the size and strength of The Dallas Morning News and WFAA, it was brick-by-brick. You had years of a mentality of 'that's them, and this is us.' We had created very, very tall walls."

Just five years later, those walls are virtually gone. Today, the relationship between the Morning News, WFAA, Texas Cable News (TXCN, Belo's statewide, 24-hour cable news channel) and its respective Web sites has become a model of convergence. While staffers once saw the parking lot separating WFAA and the Morning News as "a raging river," as WFAA vp of news David Duitch recalls, they now see it as a pipeline, albeit one still in the R&D