Anne Imanuel is the local news anchor in Salisbury, Maryland. And Meridian, Mississippi. And Hattiesburg. And Gainesville, Florida.
She anchors newscasts for all those markets from west Little Rock, playing her part in a technology-driven shift that is upending the business model for small-market TV stations.
In a chilled 31,000-SF multimedia center at Shackleford Drive and Shackleford Road, Imanuel works for The Media Gateway LLC, a pioneer in the growing world of remote TV station operations.
Producing newscasts is just one service at Media Gateway, which has an even bigger job distributing TV stations' programming 24 hours a day via internet protocol systems. Both lines of business reflect a trend of outsourcing of tasks once routine at individual stations.
Imanuel and her colleagues coordinate their newscasts for viewers hundreds of miles away, with small teams of journalists on the ground in each market providing local reporting.
"Every 30 to 60 minutes I'm anchoring in a different city," Imanuel told Arkansas Business. "I need to constantly stay updated on the issues that matter to those communities."
It's a new kind of newscasting in a consolidating industry where master control functions, the last line of quality control before broadcast, are increasingly being outsourced.
Media Gateway specializes in that sort of outsourcing, offering to save TV stations two-thirds of the usual cost for some functions. For a monthly fee it will, as its website puts it, "take over the headache of television master control and playout through our central facility."
Under the day-to-day leadership of Managing Partner Jeff Lyle and the watchful eye of New York investor Matthew Davidge, a British-born client of Lyle's who was impressed enough to buy in, Media Gate-way has become "the back room" to dozens of TV stations.
"We take signals off satellites, line up the programming with local commercials, programs and newscasts, and ship it right to the stations' broadcast transmitters, cable outlets and Dish and DirecTV, all by IP," Lyle said. "We also have the people and equipment to let stations outsource their newscasts, and do them better than they could have done on their own."
