The Athletic keeps growing .......

The professor who taught my senior seminar class in 1979 listed a study showing the average broadcast career as 2.1 years. So for every Walker Cronkite or even a producer, cameraperson or floor manager, there were about 25 broadcast majors who flamed or flacked out before they landed a second gig.

Now, with the expansion of cable and streaming, perhaps that figure is slightly better. But it just goes to show mass communications is a meat grinder.

 

My brother was a broadcast major. He wanted to be a cameraman. He worked at one job and decided that he could not deal with the egos that some of the other personnel possessed. He quit and went to work at a ski resort.

 

Why 2.1 years? My guess is the pay, which used to be good, now is miniscule, much like the 'salaries' their brothers and sisters earn in print.

 

My first full-time radio job paid $200 a week in 1980. And that was in suburban San Francisco. The pay, the hours, the competitive nature of the industry, the lack of upward career trends. A lot of things contribute to people realizing what they thought they wanted to do and the reality of what it took to do it.

Hell, I never made more than $20,000 a year as news director of any radio station at which I worked, and I doubt the morning drive jocks in those markets got anything significantly more, unless they sold their own ads for the commission. Even the bump up to mid-market Sacramento was barely above that.

Remember, 1979 was the year ESPN was founded and CNN was a year from hiring its first staff. Ted Turner was running TBS from an old mansion. There were no podcasts or satellite shows. Plus, the FCC was 20-plus years from deregulation. There weren't regional sports networks or production houses. ABC, CBS, NBC and Mutual had people with years of experience. Unless you were exceptional, you couldn't sniff a job of that magnitude out of college.

You either found a job at a small station in the boonies and kept applying for better gigs (for TV just as much as radio) or found something else that paid the bills. My roommate became an accountant because he couldn't land a radio job. I worked at three different radio stations on weekends during my time at Florida just to pad my resume with paid experience.

I don't know what the numbers might have looked like for print at that time, but I guessing the competition was just as fierce pre-USA Today. Newspapers have been folding and merging for decades as populations have moved or aged. The number of new newspapers started since I graduated from college? I can probably count those on one hand, and that includes USAT and The National.

As one example, San Francisco had the Chronicle, Examiner, News, Call and Bulletin during the heyday of the industry. The News-Call-Bulletin eventually merged with the Examiner in 1965, leaving two papers in The City (not counting the Oakland Trib, the Mercury News, the Independent Journal and community papers over the hills, like the Contra Costa Times group).

After graduation, I was doing agate for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel for $5.25/hour but wanted to go back to California (dumb move) when I probably would have been in line for preps next had I realized how the hierarchy worked. Greg Cote basically did the exact same thing for the Miami Herald, but stuck it out. Twenty years later, I was doing agate for the Durham Herald-Sun for $6/hour, so you can see how much more valuable I was!

There's never been a "golden age" for salaries that I'm aware of in my lifetime, from my first paid job in 1975 until the last time Turner broke up with me. You struggled and scraped by while you paid your dues, unless you somehow had an "in" at the New York Times, and that probably got you a copy boy or mailroom position. If you showed promise, you might get enough to live on, and if you became a name, you got paid well.

It's always been hard to have a career in media because 1. The number of people who want to do it greatly exceeds the number of jobs that pay enough to keep you alive, 2. There's going to be somebody better than you, and 3. Even more importantly to management, there's always someone willing to do it cheaper than you.

 

I accidentally subscribed for another year at the $60 price because I thought my subscription ended tomorrow. It ended yesterday and I've already autopaid for the year. That probably happens a lot.

 

I can't find a free copy of the Wash. Post story on the Athletic anywhere.

 

I found it on WashingtonPost.com.

 

That’s like me with the At Bat app. Except for Sox and Nats broadcasts, I might use it 10 times a year. But it’s only $20 or $25. Why not?

 

This is especially true nowadays, I think. And that makes me scratch my head when I see people so determined to get into sports journalism. The odds of becoming the next Schefter or Peter King or [insert prominent name of choice] are so long, it is just not smart to try to do it.

 

The answer instead is go for it, but for gods sake have a backup plan