Tribune Adding Morning News on WSFL

A recent TVWeek article about Tribune’s broadcast business gives a hint of upcoming changes on WSFL as they move to The Sun Sentinel’s offices:

In South Florida, Tribune’s CW affiliate WSFL-TV is moving into the same building as the company’s Sun-Sentinel newspaper. The plan is to leverage the news off the paper’s Web site for a morning show.

According to Mr. Michaels, it will incorporate a “very high-tech but very slick look, not all that expensive, but repurposing the very expensive newsgathering that we already do for a completely different look and feel.”

Randy Michaels is the executive VP and CEO of interactive and broadcasting for Tribune.

If WSFL were to compete directly with morning newscasts from other stations it would make them the 8th morning newscast in the market counting the newscast on WBFS 33 at 7am.

A newspaper and a TV station sharing is not unheard of. Media General’s merge of the Tampa Tribune and WFLA-TV is often hailed as a perfect example where the two media outlets share not only a newsroom but also content and reporters.

So it won’t be too radical if Tribune were to add more newscasts to WSFL to compete head-to-head with the other stations in town, it would just be new for this TV market. Whether there are enough eyeballs for everybody is another matter.

And also it remains to be seen if Tribune will continue to outsource production of the 10pm newscast to WTVJ.