THE PLAN

220 east 42nd street

Founded in 1948, WPIX is the New York flagship of the CW Network, the former television station of the Daily News and the broadcast home of the New York Mets. Owned by the Tribune Company, WPIX has occupied the same space at 220 East 42nd Street since its founding 65 years ago. Seriously in need of renovation, floors one and 10 of the building have been repositioned ahead of potential upgrades to the stations newsroom on the second floor. Part of the Tribunes concept is not only to make it more valuable for their clients, but as well to make it a special place for their employees, to want to retain and bring in new employees, said Mike Mazeika, architect and director of the media and entertainment division at Luckett and Farley. Mr. Mazeika and Chris Zerafa, vice president of technology at WPIX, spoke with The Commercial Observer about the recently completed repositioning of its state-of-the art, 32,000-squarefoot 10th floor.

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The offices of the creative group have been expanded to accommodate the teams growth and to include more outside light and open space to facilitate collaboration. Even the areas enclosed space was designed to foster an open environment. We created a space thats enclosed in glass, that they can go into, and thats where they create the content for the company, the branding, said Mr. Mazeika. They can have sunlight; people can walk by, come in and interact and collaborate with them. The sales team has been consolidated into one area after having previously been spread throughout the floor. We consolidated those guys together and consolidated their manager so their managers could be close by, Mr. Mazeika noted. The 10th-floor redesign also includes a number of conference rooms with updated technology and flat screen televisions. They meet in them every day, Mr. Mazeika said of the sales team. Theyre highly flexible. Theyre multi-use.

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Break areas have been added to each of the individual zones on the floor. Each zone includes a refrigerator, small kitchen and dishwasher for employee use. All of the content seen on the air on WPIX and its subchannels, 11.2 and 11.3, is run from the stations control room. Local commercials and promotions during Mets broadcasts are also controlled from the room. The Mets games come in either via satellite or via fiber, depending on where the Mets are playing, Mr. Zerafa noted. To the right of the control room is WPIXs Tech Core, or the rack room, where all the stations computers, encoding equipment and receivers are stored. Any signal thats coming in or out of the building, any encoding that were doing to get it from the station to your house, whether its going to the Empire State Building for our over-the-air broadcast or going to different cable companies, everything happens in that room, Mr. Zerafa said.

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1st Floor

THE COMMERCIAL OBSERVER|July 16, 2013|31