As the executive producer of WESH-Channel 2, Carrie Ferenac spent six years trying to fit coverage of murders, hurricanes, elections and other breaking news into the station's daily newscasts.

These days, Ferenac is still producing newscasts, but of a different sort. Breaking news now means a heated panel discussion at an meeting of convention industry executives or a story on the latest chef uniforms at a culinary convention.

The Orlando woman is the president of Convention News Television (CNTV), a 2-year-old company that provides local television style coverage of conventions, trade expos and other shows.

"What we bring to the table is the storytelling aspect," Ferenac said. "As journalists we know how to go to a daylong event and condense it down into five or 10 minutes."

After leaving WESH in December 2005, Ferenac teamed up formerWOFL-Channel 35 photographer Marcelo Zolessi and Full Sail University graduate and graphic designer Kevin Crouch to start CNTV in 2007. Ferenac said the company became profitable about a year ago, and that its revenues have increased each year. This year, CNTV worked 12 conventions, including shows in Orlando, Austin, Texas, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

Although hiring CNTV is typically a new expense for a convention, many of the company's customers say since convention attendance is down, providing video coverage lets members who can't afford to come stay up to date.

The company got a boost in 2008, when it hired former Orlando/Orange County Convention and Visitors Bureau CEO Bill Peeper as its vice president of sales and marketing. Having spent more than 20 years at the helm of the agency responsible for bringing conventions to Orlando, Peeper's contacts and experience have proved invaluable in bringing in new business for CNTV, Ferenac said.

"It is so much more fun and so much more exciting to work with a startup," said Peeper, 66. "It's a new concept that the industry doesn't know about and the great part has been we have not had people say, 'Oh that's crazy.'"

When CNTV gets hired to cover a convention, the work often begins weeks before the show, with the company producing a promotional video the organization can send out to members, or post on its Web site to try and entice people to attend the show.

The three founders all travel to most of the shows and they'll usually hire a freelance anchor and producer to help out. Former WESH anchor Ed Heiland often appears before the camera for CNTV at the different conventions.

Once on site, the crew sets it up its newsroom in a hotel room or conference room and holds a morning meeting — similar to the kind Ferenac used to run at WESH — to plan what stories to cover each day.

"The client kind of becomes the news director," said Zolessi, 32, the company's CEO.

CNTV sheds its brand for each show and instead becomes a news organization branded with the convention name, complete with custom microphone flags and on screen graphics. For the June American Culinary Federation show in Orlando, they became "ACFTV."

Typically, they'll produce about five videos each day, which may include a five-minute summary of the headlines from the show, one on one interviews with key executives, pieces about trade show exhibitors and coverage of interesting panels or keynotes. Their goal is to have all the footage ready to be uploaded to the convention's Web site by about 9 p.m. each day.

Associations that hire CNTV for their conventions also send videos to members by e-mail, run them on the TVs in the convention hotel rooms or shuttle busses or play them during breakfast each morning.

The group has spent about $80,000 on cameras, computers, teleprompters and other equipment and they've also worked shows in Paris, Singapore and Dubai. Although CNTV customizes its prices for each convention and can scale up or down as needed, on average customers pay about $8,000 a day to have five people cover an event, not including travel costs.

Kathleen Larmett, executive director of the National Council of University Research Administrators, said she decided to hire CNTV because she knew attendance would be down at the organization's annual convention, held in Washington, D.C., in October.

"We wanted to make sure that our members who could not go to the meeting this year could stay connected right from their desktop," said Larmett, whose organization has about 7,000 members. "This allowed people to feel like they were there."

As an added, but unexpected benefit, Larmett said that members who did attend the convention used the video news segments to watch sessions they missed because they were attending another one at the same time. She said she would definitely hire CNTV again, and she was particularly impressed that the Ferenac, Heiland and the other members of the crew were able to quickly understand the nuances of the complex issues important to her members.

Ferenac said that's a key difference between CNTV and other convention video production companies, which she said just "shoot smiley faces and music and call it a day."

"If you have covered news, you know how to walk into a situation, figure it out, get it on tape and turn it with quality," Ferenac said.

Etan Horowitz can be reached at ehorowitz@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5447. To read his technology blog, visit OrlandoSentinel.com/techblog.