Why they hate us

In college I knew several people at the college radio station, and also befriended a few radio journalists early in my newspaper career.

Hard to believe there was a career with crappier hours, pay and benefits than newspapers or TV, but radio was it. Now just about all of those jobs are gone, with "local" radio stations all running on autopilot with content from Atlanta or wherever.

 

My first writing job out of college was at a radio station in a highly competitive smaller market. The pay was atrocious and the owner/GM cheerfully screwed anyone he could, including everyone on the staff. They mostly ended up selling insurance or office supplies ... one guy did make it into the Chicago market and became pretty well-known. He had probably half a dozen stops on the way up.

The program director who hired me went into the boss' office to ask for a raise after he'd been there seven or eight years. The boss asked him to justify why he should be able to keep his job. He went into shopping mall public relations, ended up doing pretty well.

 

It's always hard to tell what's a trend vs. what's just happening in your shop... but I suspect my place is far from unique.

I'm in a top 15 market. We do a hell of a lot of news. We are on air for three hours just in the early evening hours. For that block of shows we typically have four reporters and three photographers -- meaning one of those reporters will shoot and edit his/her own story, and nothing gets shot that doesn't have a reporter assigned to it. So, that's about eight minutes of local content to be used throughout three hours of news. Managers will complain if the shows get too repetitive. (Insert shrugging emoji here.)

We have producers who moonlight for Door Dash to help pay the rent. We have an anchor who just bought a plane.

The next few months are going to be really interesting. A mass exodus has started and I think the level of anger and discontent has taken upper management very much by surprise. They're getting an earful now. Between the pandemic, the constant death threats, the low pay and the degenerating working conditions a lot of people are concluding it's just not worth it.

 

Media -- and from that I mean everything from bloggers to big-screen movies to Facebook -- are a case study in unfettered capitalism. Wealth flows upward, and people at the bottom of the pyramid get crushed. I completely understand the psychology behind the Great Resignation. I hope it continues, whatever disruption it brings be damned.

 

Twitter doesn’t help. Not the journalists. Not the consumers.

 

Her Q rating is off the charts. She’s been here 20 years. Still looks like Cindy Crawford. Men like to look at her. Female viewers aren’t threatened by her. Extremely well-read and it shows.

 

@PCLoadLetter with a great point.

18 months ago, we in TV news had to work even harder with a crisis/pandemic that we’ve never seen before. Instantly, we had to shift how we gathered news. Data. Zoom interviews instead of in-person. Being okay with lower quality audio/video because of the emerging tech.

Then the Floyd killing. Then protests.

Then a lost academic year for so many.

All throughout it, we heard from the bosses “take care of yourself!” but they did nothing to back it up.

They added another newscast for me to anchor — sixty minutes — and they never increased my salary even though I had just signed a new contract to anchor three shows a day before this fourth newscast was dropped on me.

“Duties as assigned,” the GM said when I asked for a few thousand dollars more.

I stayed healthy. Never got COVID. Solo-anchored that new newscast 30 percent of the time because my co-anchor took every day off the moment something wasn’t perfect.

I was f’ing exhausted. And I still am. Eighteen months later.

This comes off as “anchor whining” and I apologize. I’ve done every job in a newsroom except for weather. Anchor, report, produce, shoot, did sports for a decade, run the desk, some EP work.

Yet the grind right NOW is mentally draining. And I’m pissed about it.

Get mad and then get better. I have three interviews with bigger markets in the coming month. Bring it on.

 

Good luck with moving up, ex.

Again, TV is just like newspapers in that, once you manage to put out a broadcast/print edition with less than a full staff, it gets taken for granted by management.

"See, we really don't need to fill that position. And look at the budget!"

 

2020 was absolutely miserable. COVID screwed up everything. We had to figure out how to do our jobs from home. We took 15% pay cuts for most of the year. Vacation plans went out the window. Co-workers lost their parents. The election was so ugly we erected concrete barricades around the station through November and hired armed security for the crews.

On some level, though, there was a real sense of putting your head down and plowing through it. We did the best we could under terrible circumstances beyond our control, putting newscasts on the air that were honestly far better than anyone could reasonably expect. And at least with COVID we were providing a really important service to people. It was good to feel like your work is legitimately "essential" in trying times.

But now? We're covering asshole anti-vaxxers pretending to be nurses or parents staging "protests" at hospitals and schools. The people who have left haven't been replaced. The people who stayed are being given extra duties with no raises. Somehow I think 2021 has been more demoralizing than 2020.

 

Yes to all of that, PC and you guys had a sale to deal with on top of that. How2021 is more demoralizing than 2020, I’ll never know.

Here’s how I got hood-winked on the three/four newscasts a day thing. Got bumped up to the PM.

Previous AM agreement stated the exact newscasts I would be doing. The PM agreement does not. Just a general “anchor” title.

I’m concerned the moment I see this.

Boss: oh, that’s just a new, corporate thing.

I have no leverage here as an internal candidate. Was happy I got the job.

Eleven days after singing it (and two days after the station told the world of my “promotion”), I’m pulled into an office and told I’ll be doing a new newscast. A fourth newscast.

No more pay. Even though I come in an hour earlier to the office because, of course, we didn’t add any staff for this newscast.

The final breaking point was September. Sports anchor gets the COVID and he’s out three weeks. I’m told to do sports on top of four newscasts because we’re down to two people (waiting for our third person to get here from previous job) and the second person is just out of the school and not ready to anchor yet.

I do the sportscasts - including soloing the late news AND a 30-minute HS show two straight Fridays. Reached back and found my old mojo. They were fucking flawless.

Not even a thank you from the ND or the GM.

“That’s what the money is for!” Don Draper once barked at Peggy. I know.

When I do finally leave, they’ll both be pissed and vengeful. They may even fire me on the spot. They may demand I pay the termination buyout (it’s not that much) but, thanks to “Gambling Thread”, I’ll peel off $100 bills on the GMs desk if they do.

If they ask why (and they may not — they may just be happy to save on another salary for two months), I’ll say it is wasn’t just the money. It was that they never made me feel appreciated. Always told me (a grown-ass man with 30 years in and a track record of knowing what to do) what to do and never asked what I wanted to do.

There are moments of truth in this job where you know, exactly, how the bosses feel about you. My last promotions… the contracts were worse. Nominal bumps in pay for much bigger jobs. Each time, I almost didn’t sign it and almost stayed on the role of working weekends or getting at 2 am to go to work.

One shouldn’t be downtrodden when signing a new contract for a promotion. But I was. TV stations love to screw the internal candidate.

Will a new station be any better? Perhaps not. But in all three markets, I’ll look outside my door and see mountains or the ocean. That has value to me now.

Thanks for listening, friends.

 

Your "Cindy Crawford" co-anchor – is she a friend or a rival?
Fun to work with or a pain in the ass or even a monster diva?