Tampa Tribune names its 'audience editors' as convergence continues

Like many media companies, Media General's Tampa news outlets -- the Tampa Tribune, WFLA-Ch. 8 and TBO.com, in particular -- are trying to use required staff reductions as an opportunity to revamp, rethink and redeploy its news staffers.

For then, that means taking the next step in convergence by separating the news gathering process even further from whatever platform eventually delivers it to the reader. Employees originally hired as TV station staffers or newspaper writers may find themselves gathering information for stories aired on another platform -- or all of them.

Key to this transition is a new position called the "audience editor" -- defined in a previous memo as "the advocates for the audience and the group responsible for setting daily coverage priorities, ensuring that both quality and quantity standards are met."

This week, staffers learned the names of the new audience editors; here's the memo:

From Duke Maas, Don North and Loren Omoto:

We are pleased to announce the six Audience Editors for the Interactive Newsroom. They are:

Kiely Agliano. Kiely’s current position is Senior Editor/Design and Graphics for the Tribune. Kiely has worked at the Tribune since 1997, when she started as a features page designer. In her current role, she has been responsible for the look and feel of the Tribune, coordinating visual presentations for all news sections. She had input into the final TBO home page redesign, and she is working on the redesign of the Tribune.

Clarisa Gerlach. Clarisa is now the CND day editor. She started on what was then the Tribune’s “Comm Desk’’ in 1993, serving as a Trib page designer from 1995 until 2000. That year, she made the leap to TBO, starting as a news and special projects producer. In her current role, she coordinates news coverage and multimedia content among the platforms and the affiliate newspapers, with a focus on breaking news. She leads the daily 7 a.m. CND meeting, tracks our user traffic and drives interactivity through reader comments.

Ken Koehn. Ken is deputy managing editor for the Tribune, focusing on metro, business, features and weekend coverage. Ken came to the Trib in 1991 as a local government reporter. He covered city hall for five years, worked as bureau chief in Brandon and served as metro government team leader. For three years, he directed our regional coverage, supervising all the bureaus and neighborhood zones.

Susan Newman. Susan is now executive producer for WFLA. She came to WFLA as a planning manager and served as managing editor for that newsroom from 1995 until 2002. She has been executive producer since 2002. Susan has managed short-term and long-range planning projects on everything from hurricanes to Super Bowls. She has worked closely with the CND and the WFLA assignment desk on the merger of resources during the last year. Susan is perhaps the person in the newsroom who has been most directly involved with all of our convergence and cross-platform collaboration efforts during the last nine years.

Vidisha Priyanka. Vidisha is the Interactivity Team leader. We asked Vidisha to lead the formation of that team more than a year ago, when we decided that we needed to focus more on interactive journalism online. Vidisha has been the driving force behind the creation of our database project; under her leadership, Data Bay has grown to include more than 35 databases on everything from baby names to the Pinellas toxic plume. Vidisha came to TBO on an internship in 2001 and stayed on to become a news and special projects producer until assuming the Interactivity Team leader position last year.

Debbie Swartz. Debbie is the assignment desk manager for WFLA. As assignment manager, she prioritizes stories and assigns reporters and photojournalists for WFLA to make sure they are covering the right stories and developing content for the newscasts. Debbie came to WFLA as a photojournalist in 1995. In that role, she field produced news stories, tracked cases through the court system, shot still photos for the Tribune and operated the live truck. Debbie was a member of the team that launched the CND; she has worked to bring the assignment desk and the CND closer in mission and in work flow.

Comments

[dreaming]

if only they could just edit out the audience, then things could go back to business as usual.

[adios, news gatherers!]

"Look and feel" and "interactivity" and all that is great, I guess.

But it's sad - and telling - that out of six editors now in charge of a news-gathering operation, only one, Ken Koehn, has any experience gathering the news.

[joe hillman]

i'm told that edward smith, once his ship hit an iceberg, was named a "passenger commodore."