Director's Cut Blog with Frank Macek

By Frank Macek Welcome to the future of television graphics - the AXIS system from Chyron. As you have noticed if you are regular WKYC viewer, we made a significant operational switch October 15th that changes the way we bring viewers the graphics seen on our television broadcasts. This is similar to the change that other station groups, like Fox, have made recently where all their owned and operated stations use the same basic package of graphic elements - further enhancing brand identity. Unfortunately there is a human cost involved in this change - the days of large, local graphic departments are over for Gannett's 23 television stations thanks to this new web based technology. Almost overnight, our world has transformed to one where anyone in our newsroom can build graphics. And anyone can work anywhere at anytime with the new system - at your newsroom desk, at home or a laptop on a liveshot. How times have changed. In the old days, a producer would order a graphic from our loc...

From: Sam in Cleveland Q: I don't know if you have heard about this yet, but I came across an article saying Gannett plans on adopting a new, uniform graphics package for all of its stations. I hope this is not the case with WKYC, as I like your in-house graphics. You have an extremely talented team there. A: Yes, I am very aware of the article and what it means to us here at WKYC. Yes, Gannett has decided to institute a company-wide initiative with all our broadcast properties. This has been widely reported in the trade publications recently. Starting later this year, we will begin using a hub situation where our graphics will be ordered from our station, but made in Denver and then sent back to us via our graphics network. This is probably more a benefit for the smaller market stations than WKYC which has had a very talented art department that will be sorely missed as we move forward. In a lot of ways, this makes sense both economically and for efficiency reasons. The new system...