Hearst Television, a station group based in New York City that reaches about 18 percent of U.S. TV households through its 29 TV stations, is standardizing on JVC GY-HM100 ProHD camcorders for its Next-Generation Newsroom Project, a new initiative that expands local news coverage.
After a successful pilot project in three stations last year, the Next-Generation Newsroom Project was launched in 2010 with deployments at WPBF in West Palm Beach, FL, and KETV in Omaha, NE. Six additional Hearst stations are now using the GY-HM100 camcorder as part of the Next Generation Newsroom: KMBC in Kansas City, MO; WLWT in Cincinnati; WISN in Milwaukee; WGAL in Lancaster, PA; KOCO in Oklahoma City, OK; and KCCI in Des Moines, IA.
According to Joe Addalia, director of technology projects, WMUR in Manchester, NH, which also serves the Boston market, and WESH in Orlando, FL, will deploy new GY-HM100s within the month. Hearst plans to purchase GY-HM100 camcorders for at least six more stations in 2010.
The Next-Generation Newsroom Project represents a paradigm shift in news coverage for the station group. Rather than hold news for regularly scheduled newscasts, these news teams provide live streaming video to the Web, as well as produce edited packages for broadcast. The teams do not replace traditional news crews, but instead augment station coverage. “What we're pushing is to get more content … faster and direct from the field,” Addalia said. “Our goal is to increase our reach and win at local news; we're always live.”
News teams have a portable kit built around a GY-HM100 ProHD camcorder paired with a Dell laptop loaded with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 NLE software. For news packages from the field, the GY-HM100 records native MOV files, which can now be used natively with Adobe Premiere Pro for editing with no ingest required. Addalia said the news packages are recorded and edited in HD, and then downconverted to SD for FTP transport back to the station for the local news broadcast.
Addalia said the GY-HM100 is the ideal camcorder for the Next-Generation Newsroom Project because it is a full-featured professional camcorder that records to inexpensive SDHC solid-state media, yet it is not intimidating to non-technical personnel. “It's a small, lightweight package and it's easy to deploy,” he said.