WCBS Picks Many Partners   

New York television station hooks up with U.S. News & World Report and others to improve coverage.

N EW YORK'S WCBS-TV has surely taken advantage of the media craze for news partnerships. The station recently brokered its tenth agreement since launching its "CBS 2 Information Network" in October.
The latest--U.S. News & World Report--joins a group of newsgathering partners that includes VH1 News, Court TV, CBS Healthwatch, CBS MarketWatch, CBS News, CNN, Hollywood.com, Office.com, the Learning Channel and New York's Daily News, which had teamed up with WCBS earlier, in May.
Joel Cheatwood, executive vice president for news for CBS television stations and WCBS' news director, wrote in an e-mail to AJR that the proliferation of partnerships allows the station more coverage of specific topics. "Our thought is if we can align ourselves with news/information organizations that have a specific area of expertise, we ultimately will provide our viewers with a higher quality of information," he says. WCBS plans to add one or two more partners.
U.S. News' decision to work with WCBS was easy, says Richard Folkers, the magazine's director of media relations. "It was just a natural thing to do. It's a great station in New York, and we thought they'd be a great station to work with.... It is a chance to make more people aware of our journalism."
WCBS' information network has become "a foundation for defining the television station," Cheatwood says. And while it may seem all these news sources would take away from WCBS reports, Cheatwood says the additions have freed up reporters for bigger projects. "We now have the ability to put a reporter on a story that may take more time to develop."
In the latest agreement, WCBS will air special segments based on stories from U.S. News, particularly its "News You Can Use" section. In addition, magazine reporters will appear on newscasts analyzing major news stories. Cheatwood says the two media outlets will research stories together, and it's possible that U.S. News will work with WCBS to produce pieces based on the magazine's cover stories.
The advantage for U.S. News is simply publicity: "to give greater voice to journalism that we're very proud of," Folkers says. (WCBS is third overall in the ratings among New York's local news programs, says Juliana Silva, WCBS spokeswoman.)
New York's Daily News produces a special segment for WCBS called "Inside the Daily News," which airs weekday mornings and is composed of that day's headlines. The station also airs VH1 News minidocumentaries and crime reports from Court TV.
Partnerships between television stations and newspapers--two entities that have traditionally been competitors--have been proliferating. In December 1998, North Carolina's Winston-Salem Journal and WGHP-TV/Fox 8 in High Point agreed to share newsgathering resources (see Free Press, April 1999). The deal has resulted in added exposure for the paper, says Journal President and Publisher Jon Witherspoon. "We have been pleased with our alliance with Fox 8," he says, so much so that Fox 8 now has an anchor desk in the Journal's newsroom. The newsroom appears in the background of Fox 8's reports from Winston-Salem, and the paper's logo appears beside the station's logo on the set.
Despite the increased publicity, Witherspoon doesn't know if it has boosted the newspaper's sales. Daily circulation is 86,818. And he admits that some of the Journal's reporters get upset when the newspaper's stories show up first on Fox 8's 10 p.m. news.
Similar agreements include those among Tribune Co. holdings: the Chicago Tribune and WGN-TV and CLTV News, a 24-hour news network; and the Hartford Courant and the city's WTIC-TV. The Courant recently announced a second content-sharing partnership with New England Cable News. As a result, the paper's coverage area was expanded to an additional 2.5 million homes and 534 New England communities that NECN serves. David Lightman, the Courant's Washington bureau chief, says partnerships work as long as reporters aren't inconvenienced by being asked to appear on the air. "Everybody has made it clear that the [Courant] comes first, and [WTIC has] honored that," he says.
As for U.S. News & World Report, Folkers says the magazine is not planning any other partnerships. "It was just good timing when they had something that was of interest to us. We're not going out and looking for TV partners."
These partnerships usually benefit the television station more than the newspaper or magazine, says Av Westin, a former top-level TV news executive and author of "Best Practices for Television Journalists." "The big benefit is publicity for the newspaper or magazine," he says, adding that the real work in these agreements comes from the print side. Ego, Westin says, fuels print journalists' desire to sign on. "It's wider exposure for the journalist's work, which is quite ego-satisfying."