David Brauer at MinnPost says that WCCO radio and television will have to combine their on-line operations, creating “a single WCCO news site here. Right now, TV has wcco.com and radio has the angry-on-the-eyes wccoradio.com.” The reason for the change is a new CBS mandate, described by Chief Operating Officer for local media, Anton Guitano:
What we’re going to do is we’re going to aggregate the sites and come up with one site in each market that will incorporate the news, sports, weather. We want to make it hyperlocal, equivalent to the best local paper with all the local information and then have links to our assets outside of the local areas such as CBS News.com, CBSSports.com, etc.
Brauer doubts that the move will really make WCCO equivalent to the Star Tribune, and local WCCO spokespersons told him no such move is imminent. Brauer says the move could be interesting:
Still, points for ambition. True integration of video, sound (and text transcriptions) at newspaper-level scale would be good for local newshounds, not to mention search engine rankings, etc. I suspect that not long after this, the two newsrooms would merge completely.
Mary Turck
News Day 