It's About The Team

Now that all the Annenberg media outlets share one space, it's important that we all come together on our stories. Most convergence takes place during the morning meetings. When it's a hot story, each outlet normally wants to do something for its specific medium. This helps with convergence and allows us to share interviews. But, I do think we could do a better job of trying to be more connected.

To improve on this, we could schedule time throughout the day to keep track of what each outlet is doing. I think this would help producers include different elements in their show. We could also select shows in our morning meetings that we would want to converge on. So, whether we pick one or two story ideas, this would ensure that we are coming together on each show.

By converging, each outlet will be producing more dynamic and all encompassing stories. Because the elements that are needed are often different, our digital stories will especially benefit from this. It will allow us to not only include the package or portion of our newscast where the story was covered but we could also add for instance great sound from ARN.

In order to make this really happen, we all have to be on the same page and be willing to work together. There can't be just an ATVN team, an ARN team, and a Neon Tommy team. We have to have a middleman who focuses just on making sure things are coming together. Right now, I'm not seeing too much of that, so most of all of our stories are still very separate. But, as we push to integrate, I am hopeful things will improve. We all just need to make integration a top priority.