Media General, Inc.

COMPANY:  Media General, Inc., headquartered in Richmond, Va.

TYPE OF COMPANY: A multimedia company with ownership of numerous newspapers, television stations and online enterprises throughout the Southeast. Media General acquired WJHL-TV in Johnson City, Tennessee, when it purchased Park Communications in 1997. The following year, Media General acquired the Bristol Herald Courier, a daily newspaper in Bristol, Virginia. Both are major media outlets for the Tri-Cities region and feed into TriCities.com, the area’s primary online news source. In addition to these media outlets, Media General owns three major metropolitan newspapers, 21 other daily community newspapers, more than 150 weekly newspapers, and 22 other television stations.

TELECOMMUNICATIONS NEED:  The company wanted the capacity to stream video, transfer video files and have remote newsroom feeds between WJHL-TV in Johnson City, Tennessee; WKPT-TV in Kingsport, Tennessee; and Bristol Herald Courier in Bristol, Virginia.

SOLUTION: BVU OptiNet deployed a fiber-optic ring that allowed high-speed networking of video streams between the three sites – Bristol Herald Courier, WJHL-TV and WKPT-TV. OptiNet also established a 100 Mbps data network for transferring files, such as advertisements and news segments captured with camcorders by reporters.

RESULT: Media General reduced field-reporting labor costs because media reports collected by a single news team now could be easily communicated between the three sites.