TV News Jobs: 'Less Experience, Lower Salary'
Layoffs,
Dropped Contracts a Sign of the Times
Nervous?
If you work in TV news today, you can't help but worry about the waves
of layoffs and top talent being let go throughout the industry.
In
the biggest example, CBS
announced in April that it would cut more than 100 people at its
owned and operated stations, but cutbacks have been announced in dribs
and drabs at many other stations.
And
to the extent that stations are hiring, who are they hiring?
"They're
asking for people with less experience at a lower salary," said Bill
LaPlante II, a former CBS newsman who now runs the Media Alliance
talent agency. "They want fewer people to do more jobs for more modest
salaries."
Those
working in the industry are "bearing the brunt of a tough economy
and some unfortunate choices by top management," LaPlante said. Whatever
happened, the overall decline in TV viewership and the inability to
figure out a way to make money on the Internet while news consumers
migrate there has changed the business. “Gone forever are the days
of 49% [return on investment],” he said.
How
significant is the trend toward downsizing TV news? In a Columbia
Journalism Review article "A
Long View of Layoffs," Columbia professor Michael Schudson noted
that editorial employment in television "nearly tripled between 1971
and 2002." However, "such a historic perspective, of course, can scarcely
console journalists being laid off," he added.
According
to more recent research, a survey of news directors conducted in the
third quarter of 2007 by the Radio and Television News Directors Association
and Hofstra University, the median newsroom staff size was down slightly
over the course of a year. However, the total number of stations originating
news programming, 777, remained near the all time high of 778 set
in 2005.
The
TV news job market "seems to be slowing down or even contracting a
little bit, but it comes on top of a lot of growth," RTNDA President
Barbara Cochran said. However, she was cautious about sounding too
optimistic, given that the survey was taken prior to the latest rounds
of layoffs. "I definitely have been hearing from everyone that the
advertising climate in 2008 has not been as good as people anticipated
last year, and that could obviously have an effect on this," she said.
While
the TV news industry has grown, the revenue is now split into more
and thinner slices. "None of the broadcasts are doing well at all,
even as there has never been more news on the air than there is now,"
noted another well-placed industry insider, who spoke on the condition
that his name not be used. More high-priced anchors are going to see
that their contracts won't be renewed, and salaries in general will
go down – although there will still be exceptions for those who draw
a big audience, he said.
Given
all the severance payments CBS will have to make, the layoffs there
represent an accounting maneuver "to make next year's earnings look
better," according to this insider. "It's all a game; it will ebb
and flow."
What
can you do to preserve your own job security if you're one of those
more experienced, more expensive TV newsroom people?
Stations
are "looking for people who have a lot of different skills – digital,
the online skills, the new ways of editing and producing. They want
people to be able to do a number of different things," Cochran said.
While that may not mean you need to turn yourself into a blogger or
a "one man band" video journalist, she said, "even the anchors who
are in very secure places probably ought to be learning newer ways
to communicate."
"The
key is versatility," said Steve Ridge, president of the Domestic TV
division at Magid and Associates, which runs regular monthly career
counseling seminars for mid-career TV professionals. "I advise people
they need to hang in, adapt to and embrace change, and broaden their
skills, and they will be marketable. It's not as though it's a dead
end to hang on and hang in with traditional media companies. There's
no reason to panic and walk away."
Yet
even those who are versatile and flexible enough to keep up with the
structural changes in the industry as the result of digitization and
the rise of the Internet may suffer because of the ad slowdown that
is happening at the same time, and dwindling profits in the TV business,
Ridge conceded. "In general, firms are looking to do more with less."
By
David F. Carr www.broadcastingcable.com
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