Inquirer takes to the air p.

By: George Garneau CALLING IT "A vital step in our evolution from print to full-service information provider," Knight-Ridder Inc. president Tony Ridder announced a TV news show based on the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Plans call for the one-hour show to be produced by a separate staff of broadcast journalists who rely heavily on stories in the next edition of the Inquirer.
Produced by a new subsidiary called KR Video Inc., the Inquirer News Hour plans to debut early this summer and air seven nights a week at 10 p.m. on Tribune Co.'s WPHL-TV, channel 17.
By "combining the depth and perspective of our traditional newspaper reporting with the sound and action of video, we will have a new and critical outlet for getting that product to consumers," Ridder said.
The Inquirer's TV show, he said, is designed "to ensure that in the future, our expertise in gathering and assembling information is able to reach all kinds of audiences."
From a base at WPHL, KR Video plans to work with the Inquirer to develop a format that can be transferred to other Knight-Ridder papers.
The show will follow the Inquirer's layout and will include its longer investigative reports, the company said.
In the scenario presented by Knight-Ridder executives, the newspaper will brief the show about stories on which the paper is working, and the show will produce its own reports, including interviews with Inquirer reporters.
KR Video answers to Clark Hoyt, Knight-Ridder's news vice president and former Washington bureau chief. He said a general manager was expected to be hired soon to compile a staff of up to 50 producers, anchors, reporters, photographers and sales representatives.
The Inquirer's TV show also benefits WPHL, an ultrahigh-frequency station, by providing its only local news show. Details of the financial relationship were not available.
Newspapers on TV may signal a trend ? newspapers increasingly are seeking new ways to distribute the news they gather and to add revenue sources ? but the Inquirer's project is not entirely new.
As early as 1984, Newsday started a local cable-TV news show for New York City's Long Island suburbs. The show had its own staff but relied heavily on the newspaper for reporters and content for the hour co-hosted by investigative reporter Bob Greene. The show shut down after a year.
"We should have hung in longer," Greene said, theorizing that with a bigger staff and live reports, the show might have attracted more viewers and advertisers.
He said the staff of about 16 had difficulty producing enough news each day to fill a one-hour show. Because it was prerecorded and lacked micro-wave-transmission capability, it was unable to do live reports, even on election night. Because the show appeared on Newsday's cable channel, which consisted mostly of text, its audience remained small.
The Knight-Ridder announcement suggests a resurgence of newspapers seeking broadcast tie-ins. The latest incarnations ? including the Orange County Register and Chicago Tribune ? appear to avoid many of the missteps of the past.
The parent company of Freedom Newspapers, Freedom Communications, in 1990 started Orange County NewsChannel, a 24-hour cable news channel so local that it considers anything outside Orange County to be international news, vice president and general manager F. Lewis Robertson said.
OCN, one of half a dozen local cable news operations in the country, is housed under the same roof as Freedom's flagship Register and uses the newspaper's reporters and columnists as on-air sources in its hourly news cycles but is otherwise independent of the paper.
Tribune in January 1993 started ChicagoLand Television, a cable-TV channel carrying local news and features 24 hours a day. Its close ties with the Tribune include space in its newsroom to interview newspaper reporters on camera. Based at a Tribune suburban bureau, CLTV plans to make a profit in its fifth year.
James Longson, Tribune technology vice president, said CLTV has proved the "strengths newspapers bring to television. And television creates an outlet that reaches a lot of potential readers that we don't get with the newspaper."
Tribune spokesman Bob Carr said he expected the journalistic cultures of television and newspapers to "mix like oil and water, but what I've seen is mutual respect."
Greene, one of the nation's foremost investigative reporters before his retirement last year, said that in the future, the media will continue to converge and print reporters will become more comfortable in the video mode.
"I don't think we can be narrowly segmented anymore in our approach to the news media," he said. "As gatherers and reporters and writers, we are going to have to be good at all of those."
With similar information in print, sound on the radio, moving pictures with sound on broadcast and cable TV, and all of the above on multimedia computers, "you're coming down to which truck to move it out on," Greene said. "I think what you're doing is looking at the future."
For unions, the idea of print reporters appearing on TV raises labor issues, according to the Newspaper Guild local, which has asked the Inquirer for a meeting to discuss compensation for Guild members and for new employees.
? (By "combining the depth and perspective of our traditional newspaper reporting with the sound and action of video, we will have a new and critical outlet for getting that product to consumers." ? Tony Ridder, president, Knight-Ridder Inc.) [Photo and Caption]
?("I don't think we can be narrowly segmented anymore in our approach to the news media. As gatherers and reporters and writers, we are going to have to be good at all of those." ? Bob Greene, retired investigative reporter and editor at Newsday, who co-hosted a cable-TV news show from the paper's newsroom in 1984) [Photo and Caption]