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PART 2
CONVERGENCE IN ACTION
With a former broadcast chief as 'referee,' the 'Sun-Sentinel' hopes one of one equals three.
IT WAS TIME AGAIN LAST FALL for the kickoffof the annual Sun-Sentinel Children's Fund. The paper's biggest charity, the fund has raised money from readers for area special-needs children for 15 years. So when Sun-Sentinel Publisher Bob Gremillion decided to let Tribune Co. corporate sibling WBZL-TV 39 piggyback on the name, there were some hurt feelings at the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based paper.
A few months earlier, Gremillion might not have even considered tinkering with the name of his paper's beloved charity. But he sees things differently since taking on added responsibility for the TV station last October. Tribune agreed to give him the dual-oversight role after getting a federal waiver to, for the first time, jointly operate the newspaper with WBZL, the Hollywood, Fla.-based station it had acquired five years earlier.
"The hypothesis is that we can run the two of them more successfully than we could if they were apart," says Jack Fuller, president of Tribune Publishing. "It's truly a situation in which top management is indifferent to where the dollar revenue is recorded. When you do it on a cooperative basis, you can get close to that... but organizationally, it's a little more clumsy."
It's a dramatic departure from most other newspaper/TV cross-ownerships, where the top TV and newspaper executives in theory cooperate to leverage each other's promotional, business, and news resources, but at the end of the day are responsible for their own property.
Gremillion acknowledges there "may have been people in the newspaper who initially were disappointed in the charity decision." Now, though, the former broadcaster says, "I'm going to put on the striped shirt and be the referee. I'm trying to do what's best for the combined entity." That means not only reporting to two corporate bosses, Tribune Senior Vice President Raymond Jansen and Tribune Broadcasting-President Pat Mullen, but also keeping the peace among the newspaper and station's employees.
It's not just the suits in Tribune Tower who have their eye on Gremillion. Now that most newspapers may have a chance to freely buy broadcast properties in their own markets (pending the outcome of the battle over new...