Interactive Faculty member Howard Finberg asked Tracy Collins, the deputy managing editor/planning and multimedia at The Arizona Republic, to share how convergence is done among their television partner, KPNX, and the company's online site, azcentral.com. Here are his answers (via e-mail):

How does the sharing process work?

We have daily, 10-day, and monthly budgets at The Republic, with all three being constantly updated. The news director, managing editor, and all producers at our TV partner receive the 10-day and monthly budgets via e-mail, and the managing editor and news director receive the daily budget via e-mail. Our early morning assistant city editor talks daily with the assignment desk editor at the TV station to discuss story tips or breaking news each is pursuing. Each week, before the 10-day and monthly budgets are put out, there is a conference call between myself, the metro editor and the TV station's managing editor to discuss upcoming enterprise. I also speak at least once a day with the TV station's managing editor.

What level does it happen at?

Tracy Collins, the deputy managing editor/planning and multimedia at The Arizona Republic

Most interaction comes between the producers and managing editor at the TV station and the two multimedia editors The Republic has in the newsroom. Early in the day, they will discuss stories at greater length, and the multimedia editors will often talk with newsroom reporters to pick up any nuances of a story that might either make it a better TV story, or might indicate it won't work well on TV. This also is the conversation where a reporter would discuss why the TV story maybe shouldn't run until the late news -- (e.g.) if [the story] is competitive and a 6:00 air time might give our print competition too much time to catch up on the story.

How hard is the process?

We built this system after trying others that didn't work as well. From those lessons, we've created this process, and it works pretty well. And we also have a great go-between in the online staff, which is good about looking at both newsrooms' budgets and identify to either entity important stories that seem to have fallen through the communication cracks.

Even though you are owned by the same company, were there cultural/organizational issues to resolve?

The ownership focused the desire to make this happen; there's nothing it could do solve the inevitable cultural/organizational issues, other than keeping us motivated to get them solved. We went through our "but this is MY story" stage, with reporters not wanting to share the fruits of their hard work. Overcoming that was just a matter of building trust between the newsrooms and the understanding of the common goal. The longer-term cultural issues are over types of content and urgency. We're a newspaper, and newspapers pride themselves on thoughtful stories loaded with context and told in narrative form when possible. Highly competitive TV news focuses everything on the headline and the human impact. As a result, there have been a lot of times when the TV side has passed on all the enterprise we're doing for A1 and the Local front, and gone after a story on Page 3 of Local that has a more readily accessible human element -- and can be told in 75 seconds.

So, some of the same reporters who at first didn't want to share content then feel rejected by the process when their great newspaper stories are passed over by TV. When it comes to urgency, our TV partners are continually frustrated by enterprise stories being held a day or two for more reporting or for "mix" purposes by the newspaper. We've taken some steps to "lock" some stories into place, but if more reporting is needed, the story is not going to run. We've just made a greater attempt to identify those situations early enough that it doesn't affect the last-minute compilation of a broadcast, which can be like putting together a jigsaw puzzle while riding in a convertible.

Do you truly share EVERYTHING?

After nearly three years of this partnership, some of our better sources are so acutely aware of the relationship that they sometimes make it a stipulation when giving us the break on a story that we don't share it with our television partners. It doesn't happen often, but has happened on a couple of major stories. We evaluate those stipulations on a case-by-case basis to make sure they're legitimate requests and that the quality of the story is worth the fallout, because each incident understandably causes hard feelings. Still, outside of just a couple of reporters, our staff understands that this is the way we do business, and the fact their stories are being guided through the TV process by Republic multimedia editors helps.