For every solid TV journalist there are about five complete psychopaths with a cheese allergy who are just in it to be famous. There's a great joke that goes something like this: people in local news are just theater kids who can’t sing. Delicious. It also happens to be true. Local TV certainly attracts those who have a lust for public adulation and the rise of this type of personality in the business has without a doubt had a negative impact on the industry.
The truth is the news media is just like any other business. It’s filled with imperfect humans who all have varying levels of competence. Frankly, we’re all just kind of okay at this. That’s true for both local and national journalists. Even people who have reached the top chair of network evening news programs aren’t very good. Watch national reporters cover a topic that you actually know quite a bit about. Chances are, you’ll be able to think of a question or two that should get asked that won’t get asked. In most cases, it’s legitimately not malicious. Ultimately, the people who should be asking the questions really aren’t experts in most of the topics they cover. Have you ever seen Scott Pelley interview a Federal Reserve official? Not great.
It wasn’t always like this. So how did we end up in a situation where truly great news people are few and far between? There are actually several reasons and I’ll try to elaborate on a few of them.
It’s actually kind of hilarious how bad the pay is in local news. I graduated shortly after the financial crisis. A couple years into my first gig I was still earning just $20,000 annually for 40+ hours per week spread over a 6-day work week. My job? I was the technical director for the evening newscasts at my TV station. If you’re ever watching a live event on TV and you notice a mistake, there’s a good chance it’s either because the technical director messed something up or because the technical director didn’t catch someone else’s mess up in time. Would you like to know what the inflation adjustment is for $20,000 in current dollars? It’s $23,142. To be fair, I was in a small market and small markets pay less than big markets. But it still wasn’t much money. At the time, I made ends meet by splitting a six-hundred dollar monthly rent three ways with two other dudes and eating banquet frozen dinners. I also drank my face off. Saving? Forget about it. I had a credit card balance.
Today, these kids really aren’t making considerably more than I was. According to Ziprecruiter, the national average for news reporters is about $30,540 annually. 59% of these jobs fall somewhere between $25,500 and $31,500. And that’s not starting in year one. Some of these people have several years of experience under their belts and they’re making less than what many people believe should be minimum wage.
Now, I understand there are people who may be reading this who would take a $30,540 salary in a heartbeat. People who work in retail or fast food, for instance. I feel your pain. Truly. But it can’t be understated how stressful news reporting can be. CareerCast recently listed “news reporter” as the 7th most stressful job. For good measure, “broadcaster” was listed as 5th. The jobs that were more stressful? Police officer, airline pilot, firefighter and military personnel. The only profession in the top 5 that doesn’t pay more than a news reporter is military personnel. So there’s your barometer. If you want a high stress job that doesn’t pay well, you can choose between news reporter or the armed services.
News reporters, especially those on a crime beat, generally see some pretty disturbing stuff on a regular basis. Someone who I’m still very close with who continues to work in TV news to this day has reported on some pretty horrendous things and she’s never actually been assigned the “crime beat.” This is just a small taste of some of the stories she has reported on in her career:
To be clear, when I say reported on, I don’t mean she read the details in a teleprompter. I mean she was on-site, trying to gather details from police and family members. It’s a traumatic experience for everyone involved. And these are just the truly horrific examples that I can remember having an impact on her. There are other things that can take an emotional toll. Fatal car accidents or people losing homes to fires or severe weather. Even non-disaster stories can weigh heavy. People often turn to local news reporters for help. Whether they’ve been scammed out of their life savings or are in need of an organ transplant. Sometimes they get that help, sometimes they don’t. Then there’s the stress of finding stories, hitting deadlines, and executing everything as close to perfectly as possible.
What do they get for this? Usually it’s a bunch of crap from the community they’re serving.
Working in the media has to be one of the only professions I can think of where a complete stranger can feel compelled to walk up to someone on the job and tell them how bad they are at their profession without any repercussions at all. It happens all the time. Wear a jacket or polo with a network logo on it in public for one day and see what happens. I dare you! You’ll get the occasional person who is genuinely interested in what you’re doing. But for the most part, a bunch of people who you interact with while you’re wearing that jacket will probably hate you. Some of them will be sure to tell you. And honestly this started long before a certain political figure gave the official green light on such behavior. So don’t even go there. He hasn’t been helpful, but this didn’t start with him.
I was never a reporter during my time in the business but even I have an example of getting heckled by a rando. A few years back, I was shooting generic b-roll video of one of our anchors while he was talking to real people and trying to get a pulse on the community. After dropping off a package at a nearby building, a delivery man from a very well known package delivery business walked by and accused me of “betraying the American people.”
I’m still holding a grudge against his employer to this day. What can I say? I’m petty! I’ll never spend a dime intentionally shipping a package through his employer again. Which one was it? Disclosing that isn’t necessary and I won’t do it. Just kidding. I’ll tell you. Like I said, I’m petty. He got into a big brown truck before he left. The truck had a logo with three big letters on it. The first one was the letter “U.” Here’s a free marketing slogan for his employer’s top rival: “FedEx. We try not to hire douchebags.”
This is all largely in jest and is an attempt to illustrate a larger point. I have no problem with UPS. Judging an entire company or industry based on the actions of one or even a handful of individuals is what intellectually weak people do. But would you like to know why that UPS driver was an idiot at that moment? Beyond the fact that he didn’t know me personally, didn’t know what my assignment was, and frankly, just didn’t know what he was talking about; he saw a logo and made an assumption. I was wearing a station jacket. That station jacket had the logo of one of the big four broadcast networks. That broadcast network represented on my jacket had an affiliation agreement with the station that I worked for. That broadcast network didn’t pay my salary. A completely different private company that no longer exists did. I didn’t work for whatever network boogeyman the UPS driver created in his mind. He just hated what he understood “the media” to be and he decided to take it out on me on a random Tuesday.
Speaking of “the media,” if you use that phrase, you’re probably talking about yourself. The word “media” is the plural form of the word “medium.” In this context, “medium” means communication channel. You know how they call Twitter and Facebook “social media?” It’s because “media” broadly means messaging platform. So, if you go on Facebook to share whatever factually inaccurate political meme that is making the rounds at any given time, I’ve got bad news for you… you’re acting as “the media” and you’re sharing “fake news.”
“You guys are worse than CNN.”
Actually, no. You are.
This brings up a larger concern and something that bears mentioning. Unless there is a drastic shift in aggregate usage habits, I will go to the grave believing social media has been a net negative on society. Remember the UPS guy? He’s not the only person who feels the way he does. A lot of the people who share his view are sure to tell local news stations and local news personalities on their social media platforms. It isn’t just limited to opinions about news coverage or perceptions of an agenda though. Some of these people chime in on clothing choice, hairstyles or whether or not a personality is looking heavier than they should.
“Rebecca is fat. Get rid of her.”
“Someone needs to tell Jacob to stop saying the word ‘well’ in every sentence.”
“Amy’s dress is not flattering on her.”
“Brandon needs a better haircut than that.”
It’s amazing how many fashion experts live in small rust belt towns, but they’re there. They all watch TV news, they all look like your chain-smoking aunt, and they all comment on the perceived lack of beauty in the people they see on TV.
Do you think this has maybe had an impact? Of course it has. Far too many people in this business have been shamed into prioritizing appearance over being able to hack it as journalists. You got what you asked for, America. The beautiful people are here. And a lot of them are as useless as an umbrella in a windstorm.
As much gratification as I get out of dumping on a-hole viewers, sometimes they actually have a point. The local TV news industry has been bleeding real talent for a while. As I jokingly alluded in the very first paragraph of this chapter, there has been a disturbing rise in talentless “faces” the last 5 to 10 years or so. As more and more solid people have headed for the exits, they’ve been replaced with vain opportunists who are just trying to become influencers. I want to be clear, I’m not embellishing because I can hide behind anonymity. This is a serious problem. I’ve seen way too many people advance in this field without the ability to put together a 2 minute news report by themselves. Most of them are able to pull this off because of relationships and an ability to schmooze.
Watching talentless people ascend to higher levels without any real body of work or experience was one of the more aggravating trends I watched develop in my time in local TV news. I think every profession deals with favoritism from management and TV news is no different. Some reporters are expected to provide a tremendous amount of work on a daily basis, while others are allowed to provide very little. Some reporters get the majority of a station’s promotional effort while others get absolutely nothing. Sometimes these discrepancies in promotional efforts are justified, oftentimes they are not. This gets us to the question of how do we measure a good journalist?
If you’ve seen any local news promos, chances are you’ve seen local news stations touting their glut of Emmy nominations or their AP awards. Honestly, these awards don’t really mean shit. The reason they don’t really mean shit is because they aren’t a true representation of ability or the actual journalistic chops in a particular market. For instance, many of these services require a membership to submit a nomination. Of course, membership comes with a monetary cost and if your station isn’t covering the submission for you, you probably just aren’t going to pay the fee.
This immediately eliminates solid potential winners from the pool. I actually worked in a market that had one guy continue to win best reporter year after year. He was in more of a tertiary reporting role at his station and wasn’t supplying content on a daily basis. But because nobody else at his station or any of the other stations in the market submitted entries with any regularity, he won time after time. Then there’s the judging of the submissions. Journalists are graded by their peers and it’s a small business. This system can potentially foster grudge holding when determining outcomes when it probably shouldn’t. It’s a cut throat business.
Frankly, it’s preposterous that these awards even exist. Unlike professional sports where your champion is probably determined by scoring points in some sort of month-long playoff tournament, awards in local news are awarded on a totally subjective basis and you have to pay for them. I don’t know how much value viewers assign to these designations but it shouldn’t be much.
I’m not old by any stretch. I don’t think I am at least. But I got in the business right as changes really began to accelerate. While I only worked in local news and never for a national network, I was able to work with numerous legacy anchors at some of the stations. So I saw this transition really start to happen in real time. Legacy anchors are the kind of people who stayed at one station for decades and worked their way to the top chair. They were the people who got the big interview and asked the important people really tough questions on camera.
Will Ferrell’s hilarious characterization of these kinds of anchors as Ron Burgundy wasn’t as far off as you might think. Some of these anchors are probably still around in some markets. But for the most part, the days of legacy talent in local TV news are over. There are a lot of problems in the business model that have broadly aided in the unraveling of great journalism at the local TV level. But the first thing to understand is the exodus of talent is very real.
Like any other profession, the hard work from great employees is rarely rewarded or properly recognized. Unlike most other professions, the stress level is high, the pay is terrible, and after a long day working a thankless job, there’s a chance you’re going to get called something nasty by a viewer when you’re just trying to buy a hot pocket at the grocery store.
I can’t believe talented people are choosing other careers.
Coming up in Chapter 3, why working in a TV promotions department was eye opening.
