Chris Thilk pinged me to let me know about this article from ABC 7 (WLS in Chicago) about how it and the Daily Herald were joining forces on the news front, with the main focus being, obviously, the Internet. Here’s the money graf:
The relationship with ABC 7 will focus heavily not only on sharing of resources between Daily Herald and ABC 7 in print and on-air, but also on the burgeoning internet presence of both dailyherald.com, beepcentral.com and abc7chicago.com.
It should be noted that the Herald, while having significant presence, is by no means the Chicago Tribune, but that isn’t the point. The fact of the matter is that the broadcasters are going to look at newsgathering and reporting one way, and the print / online folks at the Herald are going to have slightly different perspectives and tactics in reporting, purely because of the medium. Sorta like watching television sports and listening to the same game on the radio - they can be very different experiences. This way, both players get the best of both worlds, theoretically improving both areas. But keep in mind that if ABC 7 is already garnering significant Web traffic in this marketplace, and that if dailyherald.com and the other sites owned by Paddock Publications are doing the same, then the mix-and-match deal going on here could make the television station that much better to its viewers, and its online presence along with that of the paper’s a bit bigger, perhaps encroaching on what the bigger papers in that marketplace are currently seeing.
A lot of that is just theory on my part based on previous things such as this that have happened, and I’m obviously not living in the marketplace, but have enough knowledge of what goes on there as well as on the landscape as a whole to get a decent idea about it.
