Fitfully Blending Papers and TV

FITFULLY BLENDING PAPERS AND TV
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Richard Silkos & Katharine Seelye]
Where's the synergy? In hometown Chicago, the Tribune owns the Chicago Tribune, WGN radio, WGN TV, CLTV (a regional cable news channel) and our beloved Cubs. Reporters for The Trib share their work with their broadcast siblings appearing on screen or being heard over the air. When it works well, information from each outlet flows in a coordinated way among all the outlets and onto their Web sites. When the Tribune Company brought the Times Mirror company for $8.3 billion in 2000, the promise was that this approach could be successfully transplanted to the nation's most cutthroat media markets, on the East and West Coasts. With its combined properties -- The Los Angeles Times and KTLA in Los Angeles, and Newsday and WPIX in New York -- Tribune would have a stake in the three biggest markets in the country and could reach 80 percent of all Americans. Not only would the properties in each city cross-promote and cross-pollinate their editorial content, but advertisers could make sweeping national buys across the media and across the country. John W. Madigan, then Tribune's chief executive, called the merger with Times Mirror "the multimedia company of the future." But the strategy has failed. While the entire media landscape is in turmoil, the Tribune properties in Los Angeles and New York have fared particularly poorly. Circulation is down, below the industry standards at both The Los Angeles Times and Newsday; at KTLA and WPIX, viewers have declined and audience share has plummeted. Nor has a synergistic bump in ad revenue materialized.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/19/business/media/19tribune.html
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