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Nashville, Tennessee

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The Fabricator
March 27, 2008


WKRN to Douse Lights
Channel 2 will debut dark-screen newscasts

Everybody who pays an electric bill knows it: One of the easiest ways to cut power consumption is to turn off lights.

But for a television station? Is that really the best way to save money? WKRN general manager Gwen Kinsey thinks so.

“I know we are a TV station, but the fact is those great big studio lights really suck the juice,” she says. “We can save thousands of dollars a
month by simply doing our newscasts using small reading lights at the anchor desks.”

A jaw-dropping rehearsal tape obtained by the Scene shows the result of Kinsey’s latest cost-cutting move: A dark screen is broken only by a small circle of light as anchor Bob Mueller gamely reads news copy in the penumbra of a desk lamp.

“We think this will really make our newscasts stand out from the competition,” Kinsey says. “The dark screen gives a ‘theater of the mind’ aspect to the news, and those shadows look especially good on HD sets.”
The “shadowcast” plan is only the latest cost-cutting scheme management has put forth at the perennial third-place news station. Four years ago, the station adopted a “video journalism” model in which reporters and photographers cross-trained and worked solo, rather than in two-person teams.

Shortly thereafter, the station issued bicycles to video journalists to save gas money on the station’s fleet of news vehicles, and, more recently, they axed Volunteer Voters blogger Adam Kleinheider, who built a popular political site from the WKRN newsroom.

One critic says that cutting lights and cutting bloggers will save money for now but could hurt the station in the long run.

“While some TV stations are improving their video quality and reaching out with new technologies, Channel 2 is going the opposite direction. A TV news operation that is cutting back on the quality of its pictures and its distribution of information—there’s a name for that future vision: radio.”

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