Broadcasting & Cable
Scripps Television is making headway on overhauling news graphics production at its ten stations, following through on aggressive plans it announced last July to centralize graphics and traffic functions for the group and reduce staff at the local station level in the process.
Scripps has completed building a graphics hub at its Tampa station, WFTS, to produce high-end graphics and has selected Chyron‘s Axis Internet-based graphics software as the underlying tool that individual stations will use to fulfill everyday graphics jobs. The template-based Axis system, which is already being used by Gannett and Fox stations, allows reporters and journalists to create graphics at the desktop that are then rendered “in the cloud” by Chyron servers and delivered through the Internet.
Scripps had previously indicated that creating the Tampa hub would result in laying off about 30 local graphic artists across the group. Creating a traffic hub at KNXV Phoenix would likely result in laying off one or two traffic employees per station.
Four Scripps stations have now gone live with the Axis system and are using a new standardized graphics package created by the Tampa hub which features earth-tone colors and larger fonts. More…