'When they build a $42 million dollar facility, you've pretty much decided to converge,' said Tampa Tribune managing editor Donna Reed. She was speaking at the national convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication about 'Convergence in the Curriculum.'

In journalism, convergence takes place when a company owns more than one media platform in a national or local market. It theoretically saves money on the newsgathering side because you no longer need separate reporters for your newspaper, TV station and Web site; a story is covered only once. And it makes money on the advertising side because the content is distributed more than once, reaching separate audiences in print, broadcast and online media. Reed was urging journalism schools to prepare students for the multimedia future.

But her remarks also highlighted an essential truth of convergence in the current media marketplace: where you stand depends upon where you sit.

Reed's newspaper sits squarely in the middle of Media General's high-profile experiment in multimedia convergence, combining the resources of the Tribune, WFLA-TV and TBO.com in one state-of-the-art building. The $42 million dollar question is whether this investment will yield a bigger audience. If you build convergence, will anyone care?

'We want to be the primary source of news and information around the clock,' Reed said. So far, it appears to be working. WFLA-TV is the number-one station in its market and TBO.com has seen a steady increase in traffic.

But being ahead of the curve has its price. To help finance convergence, Media General is canceling its Christmas bonuses for employees for the first time in 30 years. To the 3,200 workers at the firm's 26 TV stations, 50 online enterprises and more than two dozen publications, convergence must seem like the Grinch. The holiday bonus would have meant an average of $593.75 in each worker's pocket, for a company-wide savings of $1.9 million. But where you stand depends upon where you sit.

Reid Ashe, Media General's president and chief operating officer, is one of the top corporate officers whose year-end bonuses are not affected by the cutbacks. He views convergence as the price of staying in business during hard times. Feeling the pain of an industry-wide advertising slump, Media General's second-quarter income dropped 20.1 percent compared to last year. Although employees have been warned that things will get worse before they get better, Ashe remains enthusiastic about convergence in the long run.

'We've got to pay the bills in an era of declining audiences,' he said. 'Good local journalism is expensive and we have to use all the tools available to reach our audience.'

Meanwhile, CNN has built a new format for its Headline News cable TV channel. TV critics from coast to coast have trashed its cluttered screen and chatty anchors. It's another case proving that where you stand on convergence depends upon where you sit.

From the executive office of Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner, the new format is a magnet for younger viewers. 'People my age are going to have a hard time buying in,' he told a gathering of TV critics in Pasadena, CA. 'But my 29-year-old daughter is going to sit there glued to it and it's going to be servicing her needs to get a lot of different information.'

But if you are sitting in front of your TV set, the new CNN Headline News more closely resembles a badly designed Web site, with the added disadvantage of not allowing you to click on the tidbits that might be worth a closer look.

Viewers also may question why CNN bothered with hiring a former 'NYPD Blue' actress, a former Ohio beauty queen and other pretty people to read the headlines when their faces are squeezed into a tiny box in the corner of the TV screen? You could put the virtual anchor, Ananova in there and it wouldn't make much difference. One TV critic, Joanne Ostrow of the Denver Post, argued that it might be an improvement.

Perhaps the design wizards at CNN thought that reducing the TV window would remind young viewers of the video player boxes that pop up on their computers. Someone needs to remind them that the size of the window is due to technological limitations, not because the Internet generation prefers video that is too small to see on the average-sized television screen, surrounded by non-interactive blurbs of trivia.

And what's happening with the real CNN.com? It has dropped behind MSNBC.com as the most popular TV news Web site. Not far from the much-publicized new studio for Headline News, a sprawling online newsroom at CNN's Atlanta headquarters sits mostly unoccupied and ignored. Referred to by some staffers as the Taj Majal, some of the empty desks have an impressive view of Centennial Olympic Park. Apparently, CNN's idea of convergence was to lay off Internet staff and fill these seats with TV producers moving over from cramped quarters on the TV side of CNN Center. It got a little crowded when the people who post CNN's breaking news online took up residence in the TV newsroom. Where you stand depends upon where you sit.

If you sit in the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News, the Web isn't even on the reservation. Dan Rather recently invited his viewers to consult a newspaper for an explanation of stem cell research, missing an opportunity to direct users to the background information that was only a mouse click away at CBSNews.com. You'd need a biology textbook for more details than CBS online packed into a pop-up feature called 'Stem Cell Research: The Politics, the Ethics and the Science.'

Maybe ol' Cowboy Dan's ranch isn't wired yet, but there's no excuse for the rest of the industry. As Lou Cariozo of the Chicago Tribune reported, most broadcast Web sites have been scraping by on reduced resources while 'all trends point to a time when consumers will want to access news, video, text and archive clips via the Web.'

As they watch the audience slip away, the question is whether decision-makers in local and network TV news will buck the trend or embrace it. Will they invest more resources in establishing their news and information brands with young consumers on the Web? Or will they fight the losing battle to drag the Internet audience back to TV News? The New York Times credits CBS News president Andrew Heyward with the notion that 'younger people can be drawn to non-fiction programming if it is tailored to their tastes.'

That probably means that CBS will order more 'Survivor' tie-ins for the Early Show and emphasize lifestyle features at the expense of traditional hard news about government and politics. If the older viewers don't like it, they can take Dan Rather's advice and go read a newspaper. Where else can they go? NBC and ABC are competing for the same young audience and Fox News Channel owns the crowd that will watch anything as long as it reflects the conservative point of view.

Convergence is a high-stakes game of musical chairs and the big media players are reserving their seats. A Christmas bonus might be a small price to pay if you have a long-term job in a multimedia news organization that captures the audience in whatever medium suits its needs at a particular moment in the car, in the home or in the office. But can a long-term investment survive the short-term assaults from the blurb-writers at CNN or the reality programmers at CBS and other traditional networks?

Where you stand depends on where you sit. And no one can afford to sit this one out.