Parody Cards and Minting With Solsea
When I was a kid I loved collecting basketball cards. Like legit loved it. It was a borderline addiction to be honest. I share this story because it’s been really fun seeing the resurgence of trading cards as an asset class with the emergence of fractional apps and even blockchain based rarities. The nostalgia trade has been amazing to watch manifest in other things too like sneakers, video games, and NFTs.
Given the backdrop of dog money memes and digital assets like Curio Cards, I thought it would be fun to create something in jest just to see if it would resonate with people in the NFT space. At the same time, I wanted to test out the user interface of Solsea.io to gauge how much I like Solana as an investment against something like Ethereum. What I liked about Solsea was how easy it was to set parameters for thinks like royalties. The minting process took a bit of time for 44 cards but if it keeps fees down for potential buyers, I think it's worth the effort. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbI31x3FpS0
In any case, I give you Elite '21: The Fed. https://solsea.io/collection/61688c6a50ab560663908b52
In this collection, we celebrate the brave souls who have had the fortitude to print money out of absolutely nowhere. Whether with a real life printer or keyboard. Keeping Wall Street flush with buying power has been really swell.
The current base set available is a series of four famous Federal Reserve chairs. Each base set card has a mint supply of 10. There is also a 1/1 Full Fiat Parallel for each base card. Yes, I know. Very exciting. Here's Jay-Po's base issue:
https://solsea.io/nft/ERUd3QJkmykVhUv623oKjnFa5p69E2yZDHAai672VA5P
If these cards are well received, I have some other ideas for the collection that I think will be really fun. Finally, anyone who buys a Full Fiat Parallel will get airdropped a new base card of a different Fed persona when they’re released - hopefully later this month. Anyway, I hope you like them. And if you feel compelled to part with some of your cherished SOL and claim one as your own, I will be humbly elated. https://solsea.io/nft/Ht9wzPExUsPEwbjMgf6GwveEQN9Dc2MMzuD5fqccfD57
Chapter 6: It Wouldn't Look Anything Like This
Everybody has had at least one manager who would beat phrases or idioms completely into the ground. To be clear, I don’t mean popular catchphrases from movies like “always be closing” or sports references like “blocking and tackling.” I’m talking about very specific phrases that get repeated enough that they end up losing all meaning. These phrases can be specific to a work environment or they can be specific to a person.
In my last job, I had a boss who had several of these kinds of phrases. Most of them were annoying. I know I wasn’t alone in feeling that way because I obtained a catchphrase bingo card produced by a couple of my coworkers. The card was breathtaking in its brilliance. Now, despite at least a handful of the catchphrases from this card being bothersome, there was one that irritated me beyond comprehension.
“If you started a TV station today it wouldn’t look anything like this.”
This is a very specific line. It is a line that I think I heard from one manager close to a dozen times. The person who uttered it must have seen it in a trade magazine or heard someone more intelligent use it at a conference or something because to this day I still don’t believe the chief regurgitator of the line really believed it. The actions (or lack thereof) would certainly suggest it was just a sexy buzz phrase used primarily to make everyone in the room think this person had a handle on where the industry was going.
The sad part is, there was so much truth to it the first time I heard it. No, it wouldn’t look anything like this. It would be very different.
What is this?
This is a building of roughly one hundred-twenty people spread out among four departments. Those departments are content, sales, marketing, and technology. Twenty of these warm bodies are in sales and only about six of the people in sales actually sell anything. The rest are mid level managers, support staff, and specialists.
I’d estimate the news department absorbs about sixty people. Of these sixty people, four are anchors who really don’t contribute much to daily content. Five more are anchors who do contribute regular content. Five are meteorologists. Two are sports anchors. Then there are about ten reporters. These twenty-six souls are just the people you see on screen. Behind the scenes, you also have nine or ten managers of varying importance, six or seven digital content producers, ten linear newscast producers, and roughly seven videographers.
In Marketing, you’re looking at nine heads total. Three of them are viewed as creative services producers. These are the people who write, shoot, and edit commercials for the clients that the sales department works with. Three more are marketing strategists who are involved solely with station promotions. Once upon a time, I was one of those. You read about that in chapter 3. The three remaining people are the department boss, the underboss, and the graphic designer.
There is also a robust technology department that soaks up the rest of the bodies. Don’t get excited, this isn’t a technology department in the way you might envision Google or Facebook’s tech departments. In addition to maintenance and engineering personnel, this is the group that oversees the camera operations, technical directors, and production assistants. Again, these are positions I’ve held in my time in the business and I know them very well. Anyway, the overwhelming majority of these people contribute in some way to the live TV broadcast and they don’t do much more than that. Many are part time though there are full time employees as well. Without getting into the details, the same kind of inefficient workflow that we had to deal with when changing light bulbs in the studio was also evident in producing the actual newscasts as well. Each studio production had roughly five or six people working behind the scenes. Today’s technology realistically requires just two. Three tops.
So that’s what *this* is.
That’s the model of the station. It was the model of the station in 2018 when I first heard the phrase “it wouldn’t look anything like this.” It was the model of the station in 2019 when the phrase started to get annoying. And it was the model of the station in 2020 even as the business faced certain eventual insolvency. To be fair, that insolvency was expedited by a global pandemic and economic shutdown. But let’s not pretend the pandemic changed the destiny of local broadcast TV. It just sped up the inevitable.
The pandemic has been referred to by many as “the great accelerator.” The logic behind the moniker has essentially been things that people believed would happen in five to ten years will actually happen much sooner. Remote work is a great example of this. Before COVID19, the full time remote workforce in the United States accounted for about 4% of the domestic labor force. After a full year of doing business remotely, smart business operators learned a lot of remote work can be far more permanent than initially expected. In the new normal, remote work will be much higher than just 4% of the domestic workforce. Some conservative estimates have it closer to 25%.
I’m getting off topic. The point is, businesses changed because of the pandemic. Many got leaner and more nimble. The station that I worked for did neither even though there couldn’t have possibly been a better opportunity to do so.
“If you started a TV station today it wouldn’t look anything like this.”
No duh, bro. Now when are you going to do something about it? The unspoken answer to the unasked question was nothing.
Want to know what we should have done in 2020? I firmly believe what I’m about to lay out over the next few thousand words is where this business is ultimately headed even if the executives currently calling the shots don’t realize it yet.
You and I? We know though. Let’s do it. Let’s start a TV station today.
**Learning From History**
Want to know the best part about building this TV station? We actually have a case study. No, this case study isn’t another local TV station somewhere else. This case study is with one of TV’s local news siblings. Like TV, this sibling served news, weather, and sports to a local community. Like TV, this sibling provided information about the arts, local entertainment, and business. And like TV, the consumption habits of this sibling were disrupted by the internet.
This sibling is the local newspaper. And the fall of the medium has been well documented.
To understand how we’re going to build our new TV station, we have to first understand the failure of newspapers. Fundamentally, the problem facing the newspaper was a drastic change in the consumption preference of readable text. A traditional newspaper is a great example of a medium with pre-formatted, pre-scheduled delivery. It gets printed, literally on paper, then loaded onto trucks to be distributed throughout the market. Then it must be dropped off in a mailbox or delivered to a front door. From there, the consumer finally gets to look inside the pages only to find information that is several hours if not days old. Beyond that, the content isn’t curated to individual preference in any way. Nobody would ever start this business again in a daily news format because the consumption method and distribution method of readable text has changed.
I probably don’t have to elaborate all that much more on this, but the internet completely disrupted the newspaper model. Most newspapers were too slow to react because of what is called ***sunk cost***. The infrastructure needed to get the physical newspaper to its reader was large. It required raw materials like paper and ink, a massive printing press, a fleet of delivery trucks, and warehouse space for the printed copies to be stored prior to delivery.
The irony is that newspapers should have thrived as online publications. Not only does the internet eliminate a tremendous amount of overhead and equipment expenditure that physical newspapers had to deal with, but writing is literally the core competency of a newspaper journalist. It’s the same skillset. Shifting to a digital-only product would have required a few web developers and an open-minded staff. That’s it. But as I alluded, sunk cost blinds critical thinking. When there is so much capital invested in a very specific production method, it’s hard to completely punt on that production method even if it might be the sensible thing to do for the long term health of the business.
This sunk cost predicament is what the local TV industry is now facing as it pertains to distribution. Like newspapers before it, local broadcast television stations have a sunk cost in dated infrastructure. Broadcast towers, elaborate studios, and production control rooms; these things are pricey and they’re all designed with live, linear consumption in mind. The problem is live, linear consumption is rapidly losing eyeball share to video-on-demand.
Just like the newspaper before it, TV is hoping consumers will revert back to a consumption method that they’ve already rejected. Once again, this is largely thanks to the internet. The good news is that just like the newspaper before, the TV station has the opportunity to reinvent itself. While very few stations will actually do this in reality, that shouldn’t stop us from rebuilding ours today.
**It Would Look Something Like This**
Starting a TV station from scratch today is actually a false challenge. Nobody would or should do that. It just wouldn’t be a TV station. It’d be a streaming platform. Instead, we’ll navigate an old, stale TV station through the changing times. We’ll start with what we had at my last station and we’ll go through the steps that should have been taken in April 2020 when the world was turned upside down. Some of this is going to sound callous. I promise I’m not a mean person and I genuinely do feel sad that some of these steps would be essential for the ultimate survival of the company.
It makes little sense to just sit and watch 120 jobs end with certain demise if trimming 60 jobs now means you can save the remaining 60 for the long term. In the markets, we fear crashes and even corrections of just 10-15%. We’ve been conditioned to believe that corporate bankruptcy is a terrible thing that must be prevented at all costs. The result of this thinking is we have absolutely no tolerance for a declining stock market or lost jobs. But what is really happening when we have a serious market correction? Malinvestment is being purged. This is actually a good thing.
In nature, the forest fire can actually be beneficial if it accelerates the incineration of dead trees and allows for the growth of new, healthy trees. This is not to say that all forest fires are good. That’s preposterous. It is merely to point out that things can be allowed to end. Starting over isn’t always bad. What I learned while working at a big legacy incumbent is that change is incredibly difficult if not impossible to facilitate internally. Entities like this need to be taken down by disruptors. Adapt or die. I choose to adapt. We will call our new, post-pandemic TV station “the reboot.”
**The Reboot**
What’s wild about the sales department at my last station was the fact that it employed twenty people. This was way too many people even when times were good. The most egregious bloat though was easily in management. We had four managers. Four big salaries. Four people trying to micromanage the same sixteen underlings. In the reboot, we only need one manager. The old station had two product specialists. It was their job to back up the street sellers when they needed help explaining the advertising product solutions to a client. The specialists are gone in the reboot. Going forward, we expect our sellers to actually understand the products they’re selling.
That brings us to the sellers. We’re going to trim that roster from six down to three and consolidate the billing account lists. If we end up needing a fourth seller, we’ll hire another one down the line. The remaining ten sales staff personnel all play some sort of support role. Five of them handle order entry. We only need two people to adequately do that. The remaining three people handled insights, programming and log information. These duties can probably be consolidated down to one role and I’m not even kidding. So there’s sales. We whittled it down from twenty to seven. Lean and mean.
Marketing is next. It’s the only department smaller than sales. So you’d think those positions might be the safest, right? Wrong. Of the three commercial producers, one survives the reboot. Most of the commercials local TV stations air aren’t produced in house. This is an easy call to make. The marketing specialists? Again, we’re going to keep one. To take it a step further, we’re going to change the titles. No more compartmentalizing commercial producers and marketing strategists. We have two marketing producers who will backfill each other as needed. No day will be the same for either. They’ll both produce commercials and promotions.
The remaining three people from Marketing are the boss, the underboss, and the graphic designer. We’re going to cut out the underboss. The other two survive. Nine people down to four. After just two department overhauls, we’ve taken our headcount from twenty-nine down to eleven. In sales particularly, we’ve trimmed payroll by a significant margin. We can afford to give each of the eleven remaining people a twenty percent salary bump, keep productivity high and be far more cost-efficient.
Next up, content. Our cuts here are going to make this department far more nimble and it will reward productivity to a far better degree. Those four anchors who don’t contribute much? They’re getting cut in half. Two-anchor desks are getting cut down to solo anchor desks. That means double the reads for each. Sorry, guys. No pay bump for that though. You’ve already been stealing your checks. We’ll call it even now. The five anchors who do contribute to regular content are sticking around.
We’re dumping the sports personnel. Local schools have the ability to record their own games and put the highlights on YouTube or Facebook themselves. They don’t need TV anymore. It’s time to just accept it. The five meteorologists? We’re going to cut that down to four. And this is an area where we will likely make more cuts down the line. But for now, just one goes. We’re keeping five of the ten reporters. Six of the ten managers are done. We’re going from ten producers down to five. And we’re keeping all of our photographers.
Now, those in the industry are probably shaking their heads because keeping photographers is very counter-trend in TV news. But if you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re going to emphasize quality over quantity in our content strategy. We need good photographers to pull that off. We’re also keeping all six digital people. We’ve now trimmed our content department from sixty down to thirty-four. Our running total after reconstructing three departments is eighty-nine staffers down to forty-five.
Finally, the tech department. If you’ve been keeping score, we started with one-hundred twenty people in the entire building across all departments. I said we were going to get it down to sixty. Math whizzes will rightly see we’re going from thirty-one in tech down to fifteen. We’re keeping our tech director and IT director. We’re keeping one associate technician as well. There will also be a maintenance director and a maintenance engineer. We will keep five technical directors and five production assistants.
And that’s the roster. If you’ve never worked in the business before, it’s probably difficult to make sense of the last thousand words or so. Thanks for bearing with me. I’m going to try to make sense of it for you in a moment. If you have worked in the business before you might be thinking something like, “there’s no way you can run a station that lean.” I’m going to try to make sense of it all for you too. First, we have to have a handle on just how much content a TV station has to supply on a daily basis.
**Content Structure**
24 hours per day. That’s how much time every TV station in the country has to fill. A typical local TV station probably gets 8 hours from the network, 7 or 8 hours from syndicated programmers, produces 6 hours locally, and maybe fills the rest with late night paid programming or syndicated reruns. Generally, if it can be avoided, these local station affiliates avoid re-running programming if they can help it. That’s silly. Why? The expectation that viewers watch a single network all day every day is unrealistic. Nobody can possibly watch everything. It’s okay to show some content that people may have already seen.
This is not true for news of the day. I’m actually not proposing local TV stations scale back their locally produced time on the schedule. Quite the opposite. It’s just not going to be the same kind of content and we’re going to change our day to day focus entirely. Currently, TV stations put most of their resources behind filling a newscast with very specific content at very specific times. It’s all highly formatted and made with a “TV-first” mentality. That needs to end. The mentality of everything should be “streaming-first.” Ultimately, it can and should run on linear TV second.
We can’t flip that switch overnight though. So we have to navigate through linear as lean as possible while we build our streaming monster. We’re going to shift the focus of our most talented storytellers and photographers to content that is far more evergreen and that can be watched more than once.
To accomplish this, the production structure currently in place at most TV stations needs to be blown up entirely. Right now these stations have a handful of reporters gathering content on a daily basis that gets packaged into a 90 second story and then presented by two anchors who take turns reading intros that toss to the stories. Most of this content has a shelf life of a day or two, tops. It’s also highly edited down for time. This structure has outlived its purpose.
TV news viewers don’t need four or five reporter packages that eat up six combined minutes in a newscast. Odds are, two or three of the packages just aren’t compelling enough to actually be news stories. Maybe one of the stories actually is compelling and can be allowed to breathe a little bit more. Rather than four short clips, what if we just had one really well done five minute story? What if those other three or four reporters could instead spend their time finding and producing other stories that have more impact. If they weren’t required to force it with non-stories everyday and churn out another 90 second package with no shelf-life, it would be much easier to repurpose that time to create more useful material.
What if these more useful stories could be posted as soon as they’re ready to a station-owned streaming app or website before then going live on the linear broadcast? What if the streaming app or website also had a premium tier? What could live on that tier? Maybe full interviews with the people who are in these stories. Maybe exclusive long form content that presents an additional angle to the story. Maybe non-news of the day content that is hyper-localized. How about deeper-dive investigations or documentaries? How about reviews of local bars and restaurants? What about exclusive performances from local musicians or stand-up comedians? There are a variety of possibilities if local TV news stations would stop thinking of themselves as daily news companies and instead think of themselves as local media companies. News can be a part of that, but it doesn’t have to be everything.
The beauty of this programming overhaul is the content that you build for the streaming app to be viewed by paid subscribers on-demand can also be used for the linear broadcast in the traditional ad-supported, appointment format. We’d be restructuring our agreements with syndicators and the major networks. We’re not paying to lease content anymore. We’re going to be really good at making our content and distribute it how we see fit. It doesn’t mean the network affiliation model or syndication model is dead, it just needs to be tweaked. Local news TV stations need to decide if paying for content that major networks can just as easily stream direct to consumers themselves is something that has a positive net return in the future.
We’re still going to produce live TV newscasts every day for 5 more years or so. We’re going to use our bare-bones staff to execute those newscasts. Don’t worry, the directors and production assistants are getting raises. The content is just going to look different. We’ll spend less time churning through stories that don’t matter and more time focusing on topics that do. We’re keeping our best journalists, story tellers, hosts, and videographers and putting them on projects that allow them to really shine. Not just from an impact perspective but also from a creativity standpoint. It will no longer be taboo to run the same news story five or more times in a day in local linear newscasts.
Our core competency is publishing media and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’re just not going to waste our time anymore. We’re going to give our consumer options. Direct to consumer on-demand or traditional linear with ads. You pick, individual. We’re not going to decide for you anymore. Want more content? We’ll have a premium tier that allows you access to exclusive content.
There is clearly something happening in the creator economy. Platforms like Patreon and Substack have proven the viability of the subscriber/supporter model. It’s time local TV news entities embrace this change and become relevant to younger audiences again. All of these changes I’ve recommended have to come from the top. The Sinclairs and Nexstars of the world have to allow some of the stations in their groups to tear it down and start over as an internal pilot project. If it works, the parent companies can scale the concept at the rest of their properties. A small town, ratings laggard at one of these companies is a perfect candidate to try something like what I described above. The pandemic was the opportunity to pull the trigger. As far as I can tell, nobody is doing this yet. This is ultimately what led me to depart the business. We had our opportunity and we missed it.
In chapter 1, I described local TV news as a freight ship. I wanted it to turn like a speed boat but it can’t. It’s just going to crash. That’s the painful reality. Like all incumbents who are too big to change from within, the most likely outcome is that a far more nimble insurgent will destroy the incumbent. That’s true for local TV news just like it was true for local newspapers and local radio stations. Sure some of them are still around. But what is left of them is a gutted, consolidated, hollow memory of what was once there.
Media companies come and go. Local journalism will have a future. It just won’t live the way it did before. It will live on platforms like Substack and Medium. Or platforms like read.cash, Odyssey, and Rumble. There are platforms that haven’t even been created yet that will host the next crop of storytellers and reporters. Ultimately, the sky's the limit.
“If you started a TV station today it wouldn’t look anything like this.”
True.
Actually, you just wouldn’t start a TV station today.
More true.
Chapter 5: It's The Distribution, Stupid
Don’t mind the title. I’m not calling you stupid. I’m calling everyone stupid. Which means I’m calling you stupid. Actually I’m calling my old boss stupid. You’re not stupid. I’ll move on…
Now that we’ve covered some of the key problems in the content, marketing, and selling of local TV news, it’s time to start getting into the biggest issue facing the industry. Trust me when I tell you, this is the one that will unravel the entire business model and there are few people in leadership positions who truly grasp what is unfolding. To comprehend where local media is going to end up in the next few years, we need to first understand the distribution model.
We need to know what the current media landscape looks like and understand why it’s all getting disrupted. To do that, we’ll take a brief walk through the history of the sector. This will help us better understand how we got to this point and hopefully help us in making educated guesses about the future. You can even put your investment hat on for this chapter if you like.
If you’ve ever talked to someone with “some season” on the old age numeral, you’ve probably heard some variation of “back in my day we only had three channels to watch. And we didn’t watch cat videos or people falling down. It was good wholesome programming like Johnny Carson. Where’s my prune juice? Agatha? Hello? Is anyone there?”
Okay, that was a little much but you get the idea.
These people are not fundamentally wrong. The current pay TV structure we have now, the one that is now unraveling, isn’t how this whole TV thing started.
**Broadcast and Cable**
Legacy broadcast networks used to have a very strong share of consumer video consumption. These national networks are still around today and you probably know them by name. ABC, CBS, and NBC. In addition to these big broadcast powerhouse networks, there have historically been dozens of smaller broadcast station groups that have had affiliation deals with the national networks mentioned above. Affiliation deals enable smaller companies to broadcast the programming of these major national networks. This has historically been a mutually beneficial relationship for the networks and the station groups.
The station groups get popular programming to sell to local advertisers and the networks get distribution infrastructure. Subsidized through advertising, all of this broadcast content viewing was free over the air (OTA) to any consumer with an antenna. To this day, these signals are still transmitted from big towers and broadcast for free. That said, the market footprint of OTA viewers is tough to estimate. It’s probably somewhere between 5 and 15% depending on the city. Generally speaking, the more rural your living area, the larger the footprint of OTA households.
With antenna viewing, the distribution model has just one layer separating the content owner from the consumer. Let’s use the CBS affiliate in Atlanta as an example. The call letters for CBS 46 in Atlanta are WGCL. WGCL doesn’t actually own the CBS content that it provides viewers and CBS doesn’t actually own WGCL. WGCL is owned by a company called Meredith Corporation. That makes Meredith an added layer in the distribution chain between the content and the consumer. This matters, so if you don’t understand it, re-read until you do. If that fails, just ask me in the comments and I’ll try a different way to explain.
*Side note: as of writing, Meredith is actually pending a sale to Gray Television. There’s a lot of consolidation happening in local broadcast TV and these full company acquisitions have been really accelerating the last 5 years or so. Ultimately, there will probably only be 4 or 5 that remain when all is said and done. There’s a critical reason for this that I’ll get into shortly. Side note over.*
We’ve established that station groups like Meredith have historically been a layer in the distribution chain. Then cable came along. Suddenly, instead of 3 or 4 channels, viewers had dozens or even hundreds of channels to choose from as long as they were willing to pay the cable provider the subscription fee to get the whole bundle. For consumers this was good. In addition to a plethora of new viewing choices, even the local broadcast network affiliate channels were included. Everything was in one place and viewers didn’t have to fuss with antenna signals to get their programming crisp and clear.
However, the emergence of cable and satellite providers added another layer to the distribution model. With added layers come added costs. Cable and satellite operators charge subscribers a monthly fee for the TV bundle that they’re buying. From that monthly fee, cable providers have to pay station group owners like Meredith carriage or retransmission fees for the rights to distribute the content. When these retransmission or carriage agreements were reached, the cost of the programming was always passed down to the customers. It’s critical to grasp this concept because it’s one of the biggest reasons why the business model is breaking down. The local broadcast network affiliates that consumers had been able to get for free over the air with an antenna became *not free* with the rise of the cable bundle.
This pay TV model worked well for a while. Beyond just advertising revenue, local station groups started building out a secondary revenue stream through carriage fees. But around 2012 or so, things began to change. Frustrated with the ever increasing monthly costs and scores of unwatched channels, consumers began cancelling their pay TV subscriptions. This became affectionately known as “cutting the cord.” With pay TV households in America declining and the rapid rise of Netflix, a new era in media began taking shape.
**eMarketer** is now projecting that there will be more non-pay TV households than pay TV households by 2024. You know this. I know this. The problem is, the local TV station groups aren’t yet grasping what their true exposure is to this trend. Years of easy money are coming home to roost. https://www.emarketer.com/chart/245043/us-pay-tv-vs-non-pay-tv-households-2017-2025-millions
**The Easy Money**
A few years ago, the local broadcast station groups like Gray, Meredith, Nexstar and Sinclair noticed something. Even though cable-only entities like ESPN were generating ridiculous amounts of stable monthly revenue through these carriage fees, it was actually still the core broadcast networks that were getting most of the viewership from the average TV household. Afterall, just because a customer subscribed to cable or satellite, it didn’t mean they were watching ESPN or CNN despite the fact that they were paying for them anyway. The local station groups realized they weren’t getting compensated for allowing carriage of their signals the way ESPN was and they arrived at the conclusion that they needed more bargaining power when retransmission contracts were being renewed with the Dish and DirecTVs of the world. If the pay TV providers wouldn’t agree to the terms, the station group would cease allowing carriage. This is what is called a “blackout” and you’ve probably experienced this phenomenon once or twice if you’ve ever tried to watch a local station through your cable provider and were instead presented a full screen graphic saying that you can’t.
Executives at companies like Gray and Sinclair understood that the threat of a blackout on a local cable provider wasn’t as daunting if the station group only held 20 local stations as opposed to 100. Thus, the consolidation began to accelerate. As larger companies gobbled up smaller ones, suddenly the local TV station parent companies like Gray had greater leverage at the bargaining table with companies like Dish and DirecTV. This proved brilliant at first. With more stations threatening blackout at each retransmission renewal, the amount of money the cable and satellite companies had to fork over for the rights to carry the local broadcasts began to ramp. In the last 4 or 5 years, these large local station groups have seen their retransmission fees as a percentage of their total corporate revenue balloon from the mid teens to 40-50%.
Fair or unfair, I can’t say. Truthfully, I’m not going to even attempt to justify or decry these increases in carriage fees for the local stations. In many cases, these fee increases were probably necessary because the major networks began squeezing the local station groups for more at each affiliation renewal. Afterall, somebody has to pay for those expensive NFL contracts that CBS, NBC, and FOX agree to. The fact of the matter is, increased fees are generally passed to the consumer. Consumers unknowingly were paying a convenience fee to not have to switch inputs on their television when they wanted to change from a cable channel like TNT to a local broadcast channel like CBS. For the local station groups, this was easy money. Finally, a stable revenue stream insulated from the market action of advertising. In hindsight, everybody who wanted a piece of the easy money pushed the customer too far.
**Streaming Becomes a Thing**
This all brings us to now. Netflix has done something spectacular. It has helped create a market expectation of on-demand viewing. To be clear, the Netflix business model is certainly not without issue. Sustainable or not, Netflix has proven a concept. And that concept is streaming, on-demand video. This market expectation is disrupting the media landscape to an incredible degree. And if you missed the investment ride in Netflix, don’t worry, this shift in video consumption is really just beginning. Because Netflix helped prove out the streaming consumption method, content owners have figured out that there are layers to the current distribution model that may not be necessary.
Who are these content owners? There are actually a lot of them. Disney is a big one. Disney owns ABC, ESPN, Star Wars, Marvel, and a whole bunch of other shit that kids like. Ever heard of Disney+? Okay, stupid question.
“Hey, want to watch Mandalorian?”
“No, Dad. Toy Story again.”
Ah the joys of fatherhood.
Anyway, the success of Disney+ is just the beginning. Now, a whole bunch of other content owners are building out their own direct to consumer streaming platforms too. Some of these content owners absolutely must do this because they are so big, they actually have exposure to the pay-TV apparatus as well. Exposure to that model threatens to erode revenue significantly if they don’t plan for a streaming solution. Comcast immediately comes to mind. That’s a big pay-TV provider that also owns NBC, Bravo, Universal, and a whole bunch of other shit that kids like. Ever heard of Peacock?
“Hey, want to watch The Office?”
“No, Dad. Kung Fu Panda again.”
UGH.
The point is, content owners are going direct to consumers. ABC is owned by Disney. NBC is owned by Comcast. CBS is owned by ViacomCBS. Disney has 3 streaming services. Comcast is making an effort with Peacock. ViacomCBS is doing the same with Paramount+ and PlutoTV. Even FOX bought Tubi. The writing is on the wall for the local station groups. Like it or not, a ton of the content they’re leasing from the major networks is going to be available directly to the consumer in a streaming platform. So what does this mean for the locals?
**The End of Local Station Affiliations?**
Look, I’m not going to sit here and say all of these local affiliate agreements are dead in the water. I think there is still probably a benefit to sharing programming and infrastructure between the station groups and the networks. But I don’t think all of these local stations are going to survive. Each station group and property probably needs to be assessed on an individual basis. And we need to remember, a lot of these local affiliates are paying the major networks for the rights to the programming. At what point is that no longer economical for the local TV stations? I’d wager for CBS, FOX, and NBC affiliates it would be whenever the NFL finds an exclusive home on the various streaming platforms that are sure to place bids down the line.
Earlier in the chapter I used Atlanta’s CBS affiliate WGCL as an example. A big city affiliation like that one is probably relatively safe for both parties but what about a town like La Crosse, Wisconsin? Does WKBT, the CBS affiliate in La Crosse, continue as a CBS affiliate much longer? How about FOX affiliate WYZZ in Peoria? That station is owned by Sinclair shell Cunningham Broadcasting while Nexstar produces WYZZ’s news in a studio that it shares with Peoria’s local NBC affiliate, WMBD. It’s a massive confusing clusterfuck. And it’s widely unnecessary to have the same newsroom producing content for two different TV stations in a town the size of Peoria, Illinois. The town clearly can’t support as many TV stations as it used to so why is the business forcing it to?
How many TV newsrooms do these small towns need? If affiliation agreements go away, how can a station like WKBT go from filling 30 to 40 hours a week with locally produced content to ALL of the hours? It can’t. And if it’s forced to do that, it probably just folds instead. This is what local stations are probably going to be up against in the next 5 years if not sooner.
**Connecting all the dots**
Whether they realized it or not, pay TV consumers in the US were paying for all of the local content they could have easily watched for free with an antenna. This stable subscription money eventually grew to a revenue stream that rivaled the advertising buckets of the local TV station groups. The major networks sell content to local station groups. Local station groups sell the rights to that content to cable and satellite providers. Then the cable and satellite providers sell it to consumers. Two full layers of middlemen between content owner and end user. Two layers of added costs and inefficiencies disguised as efficiencies. Is it any wonder the consumer finally opted out?
Before the internet, a reversion to free over the air viewing may have been possible as pay TV bundles became too expensive. But just as the internet disrupted physical printed newspapers and analog radio stations, bandwidth has again improved and it’s finally video’s turn to face the reckoning. Now though the entire content consumption preference has shifted from appointment television viewed in real time to streaming video on demand. Local TV executives took this very critical consumption change for granted.
Historically “the demo” always watched live TV, just not local news. TV executives have always seen “the demo” start watching live local news as they grew their families and started paying more in taxes. Well, this time it truly is different. The only live TV people in “the demo” seem to watch is sports and they even appear to be getting tired of that. TV rested on its laurels. TV people expected you to be there because you always were. You were just a little more selective in your viewing. Now you’re not there at all and they still haven’t really figured it out.
Taken together, we have a drop in viewing. Which will undoubtedly lead to an acceleration of TV’s eroding ad-supported model. We have a drop in pay TV subscribers. Which will lead to a big decline in the retransmission fees that local station groups collect. The two core revenue buckets for local TV news properties are both getting shredded at the same time. And the programming that these businesses have relied on through network affiliation agreements isn’t guaranteed to be available forever. It’s a truly terrible fundamental setup. I can’t think of many investment sectors I like less than local TV news station groups. Maybe banking institutions. But honestly, it’s a toss up. Love her or hate her, Cathie Wood isn’t wrong.
The good news is, I’m not here to just shit on everything without providing solutions. I have a roadmap and a station structure that I will share in the sixth and final chapter.
Miss any chapters? Catch up: Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4
https://read.cash/@Crayban/chapter-1-the-third-spirit-2f072f49 https://read.cash/@Crayban/chapter-2-the-exodus-of-talent-7e96e50d https://read.cash/@Crayban/chapter-3-time-to-shit-your-pants-mom-d82f8544 https://read.cash/@Crayban/chapter-4-a-broken-process-76409149
Chapter 4: A Broken Process
I spent over 8 years working in the production and marketing of local TV news. I certainly had my ups and my downs in that time but I thought I had a fairly good handle on the business after close to a decade in the industry. I was dead wrong. Yes, I knew the content side and the creative side. But it wasn’t until I made the move to sales that I really figured out just how upside down the local TV news business truly had become.
Working in television sales was awful. There are so many issues that are worth highlighting but I’ll focus on the main problem. I’m not even going to touch on how shitty it is that the lines of real news and sponsored content have been blurred to the degree to which they have. I think John Oliver did a masterful job of that already and I can’t possibly improve on it. Instead, I’ll just focus on the core business model.
The problems with the TV news selling process run far deeper than just sponsored content. Like many of the societal issues we are currently facing in America, to understand the genesis of TV’s problems we must first start with the currency.
Ratings
Currency is a word that is of considerable importance in the TV business. The word is defined as a medium of exchange. The most well known currency is the one that many people transact in on a daily basis, the US dollar. Because of the distribution I’ve chosen for these writings, If you’re reading this, you’re probably already well aware of the problems with USD as a currency. In the TV business, the currency is “ratings.” When you get to a certain age, the word “ratings” becomes common nomenclature though few actually know what it even means or how a rating point is calculated. That goes for both viewers and people actually in the business.
A rating point, simply, is the average percentage of the available audience that a program acquired for the duration of the telecast. For instance, the Super Bowl is famously the highest rated telecast on American TV year after year. But the ratings in each city vary based on how many TV households are in the market. When you hear about the ratings for big ticket telecasts like sporting events, you’re more than likely hearing the national ratings. Each localized market (DMA) has its own rating figure as well. But you have to remember, the rating is a percentage of the available audience. And that audience is not only bigger or smaller depending on which city the viewers are in, but also how many of the households in that city are considered TV households.
This is an important concept to understand because TV households make up the Universe Estimate (UE). And it is the UE that is ultimately the denominator in the ratings calculation. Let’s say there are two different cities that each have 1 million people living in the DMA. We’ll call them City A and City B. If Sunday Night Football gets a 15 rating in City A and a 15 rating in City B, it might be assumed that each city produced the same amount of viewers of the game. Chances are it didn’t. The reason it didn’t is because of the UE. If City A has 500,000 TV households and City B has 400,000 TV households, a 15 rating in City A produced an audience of 75,000 households while a 15 rating in City B only produced 60,000. I promise I’m getting to why this is a big deal. Stick with me, we’re almost there.
The reason this matters is because cord-cutting has accelerated the decline of TV households and the rise of broadband-only households or BBO households. These shifts in household designations have contributed to fluctuations in the UE for every DMA. As the UE decreases, the amount of households that a rating point represents decreases with it. This is the great lie of “ratings.” A 10 rating in 2015 is not the same apple as a 10 rating in 2020. It’s critical to understand this because it’s the reason why ratings as a currency should go away and be replaced by something like viewers or impressions. Why don’t we just include BBO households in the rating? Long story short, the ratings services are trying, but they’re not there yet.
Methodology
Historically, there has really only been one company tasked with measuring the ratings of TV programs. That company is Nielsen, though measurement methodologies have definitely improved through the years, the old way of assigning ratings was done through what were referred to as diaries, or survey books. These diaries were literally printed out books that were mailed to participating households. The people who received these books would fill out what programs they watched. They’d note when they watched the programs, how long they watched for, when they flipped the channel, what they flipped to, how long they watched after flipping; you get the idea. When the survey was finished, the books would be sent back to Nielsen, Nielsen would compile all of the data, and then after a period of time, report the findings. These findings? You guessed it, ratings.
It seems crazy now given how immediate and how targeted digital advertising is, but for most of the existence of TV measurement, ratings were only compiled in February, May, July, and November. This is why TV stations used to bring out the big guns in those key months. The networks would run important programming like season finales in May. Newsrooms would plan their big investigative stories for those months. These months were called “sweeps” periods.
Now, aside from the fact that twelve months of media buying were largely decided by just four months out of the year, the added element of absurdity in the ratings methodology was that the viewing logs were physically filled out by the participants with paper and writing utensils. It was expected by Nielsen and by the station groups subscribing to Nielsen’s service that these survey books were filled out every day for the entire month. If a person with a survey turned on the TV and started watching their favorite show, they were to write it down and log the activity at that time. If after 15 minutes they decided to change the channel, they were to log that too. While I’m sure there were some exceptions, most people were unlikely to fill out these diary books in this way. Instead opting for last minute guessing when they remembered they needed to fill them out at the end of the month.
The “winners” of the entire broadcast industry were determined by the results of these diaries. On both a local and national level. We’re talking about content decisions, talent decisions, and most importantly, spending decisions. All largely made based on the information in these survey books.
It should be mentioned that there was compensation to the viewer for participating in the diaries. It wasn’t much, but if you had nothing better to do and you needed the money, it was an easy way to get a couple extra bucks during the year. Now, anyone who knows anything about human behavior knows that this is an awful way to measure content consumption. People are lazy. They would forget they were supposed to do it. Then at the end of the month when they wanted to make sure they got the money, they’d panic-finish the survey book with as much as they could remember and just guess at the rest.
This obviously led to a lot of problems. Networks would often find that Nielsen credited certain programs with absolutely no viewing. Imagine, a massive tower broadcasting a free video signal to hundreds of thousands of homes and not a single viewer would register. Sound plausible? Of course not. Another problem would be Nielsen would credit other programs with far too much viewing. Early on as a consumer analyst, I learned that surveys were great at measuring preference or brand health but terrible at measuring true behavior. I touched on why that’s the case briefly in the last chapter. People just generally aren’t honest with themselves and might think they watch the news every day when they really only watch a couple times in a given week.
Thankfully, Nielsen and it’s younger competitor comScore don’t measure TV viewing in this way anymore. comScore actually never did. Nielsen has a handful of different methodologies that vary by market. As you might have guessed, these methodologies also have considerable flaws. While the days of paper survey books are gone, many larger market cities rely on a more electronic version of the viewing logs. When a Nielsen participant turns on the TV, they are to identify which person in the household is watching. Anytime a Nielsen participant household has a guest in the home, they are to log a visitor. This can potentially skew data if it isn’t logged accurately.
One recent example of this data becoming skewed is from a Nielsen home that was hosting a house guest for an extended period of time. The guest was incorrectly logging viewing data and Nielsen’s system ended up extrapolating dozens of people in one home, all watching the same crappy network television. Because of how the methodology works, a sample increase of that magnitude in one Nielsen home created a projected viewing level that was far beyond what it should have been if the guest’s viewing log had been measured accurately. The point is, even in the digital age, when you require active participation from the lab rat, the data can get fucked up pretty easily.
For now, it’s important to understand this background and what ratings have historically been because it helps grasp why buying and selling TV currently is still such a mess. Again, ratings are the underlying currency. And the best currency in broadcast television is still adults between the ages of 25 and 54 years old. Why? Because these are the people who we think are at the peak of their household spending. They’re moving up in the world professionally. They’re getting married. They’re having kids. They’re buying houses and cars. They’re acquiring wealth. They’re exactly who advertisers want to reach. This group of people, adults between 25 and 54 years old, are what is referred to in the business as “the demo.”
Targeting “the demo” is stupid
Don’t believe me? Let's dive in. Targeting the demo in 2021 is stupid because the demo is a hypothesis. This hypothesis was the best approach to buying and selling media before the internet. But now we have the internet and we’ve had it for a pretty long time. With the internet has come data. Big data. We don’t need to hypothesize anymore. We actually have a better system for buying and selling already.
Ratings used to be determined by survey books during the months of February, May, July, and November. They aren’t anymore. Nielsen now measures viewing through several different methodologies. None of them require survey books. And this measurement is happening all day every day, 12 months out of the year. There are meters, audio watermark readers, and something called return path data (RPD). RPD is essentially a coded log of what viewers are watching through their set top boxes. So if you’re in one of the roughly 75 million households in America that still has cable or satellite service, there’s a high probability that Nielsen and comScore know everything you’re watching.
Ready for the really scary part?
They don’t just have your set top box. They have your internet service provider. They have your search history.
They have *you*.
Who are “they?” They are big data firms. You can probably guess who they are. If you don’t know, Google it. Hey, I just mentioned one of them! There’s a reason why when you search for a shirt on Amazon and don’t buy it there’s a good chance you’ll keep getting reminded through some other platform that you should totally buy it. This is the digital age. Buying advertising is completely different than it was just 15 years ago and the smart companies are doing it right.
The smart companies know that you don’t have to buy an adult between the ages of 25 and 54 years old and hope they’re in the market for a new car. You can buy someone who has been poking around dealership websites or looking up car reviews online. You can geographically target people who have set foot in an auto repair shop and hit them with a new car advertisement on Facebook. There’s a decent chance this person is or could be a vehicle intender. It makes more sense to try to advertise to this person than a random 45-year-old if you’re truly just trying to sell cars.
Now to be fair to television, the speed of processing this data and churning out an intender is a little bit slower. But what’s important to understand is the internet and updated measurement methodologies have made it so this targeting is still possible even on linear broadcast television. comScore, for instance, takes your RPD data from your set top box and matches it with your address and your internet provider. From there, they can see which households that watch The Masked Singer on Fox were also searching for Toyotas online recently. With all of this intention targeting capability on TV, guess what TV agency buyers and local TV sellers are still using as “currency?”
Ratings for “the demo.”
It’s pretty dumb and nobody on either side of the table is willing to change the currency because it’s hard. Advertising agencies and media sellers have been incredibly slow to adapt. If the flaw in this process hasn't quite landed yet, I’ll give you an analogy. Imagine you’re a manager of a pizza place and you want to hand out coupons to people in your town to drive traffic to your store. I’m running a consumer marketing event and I come up to you and I say, “I have two rooms filled with people and you only have time to enter one room. Room A has 30 people who are hungry and love pizza. Room B has 100 people and all we know is how old they are. Which room do you want to choose?”
Duh, Room A.
Now let’s pretend you’re not passing out the coupons. You pay a guy named Bill to pass out the coupons for you and Bill always picks Room B. Why? Because Bill also passes out coupons for other businesses in town and Room B has more people. Ultimately, there will be people in Room B that take some of the pizza coupons. There will be people that probably take some of Bill’s other coupons too. It was easier for Bill to pick Room B because he probably satisfied each of his clients enough to make entering the room on their behalf worthwhile for all of them. But we know you had a room that was a better fit because all 30 of the people in the room were the people you wanted to reach. Room B, though it had 100 people, may have only had 15 who were hungry and wanted pizza. TV buyers are still largely buying Room B and they shouldn’t be because one size fits all doesn’t work in advertising.
Points
Now that we’ve established what ratings are and why demographics are a bad way to buy and sell advertising, it’s time to really hammer home the idiocy of the process. The ratings are called “points” by ad buyers. If a local newscast averages a 12 rating, buying one spot in that program would constitute buying 12 “points.” Points are the real currency and this is where years of egregious complacency from TV advertising sellers has irreparably hindered the business model.
Once upon a time, everyone watched TV and it was easy to sell the broad reach of broadcast television. Since prime time ratings were strong with younger viewers and the ad spend in the industry was robust, TV ad sellers allowed TV ad buyers risk-free campaigns. What’s a risk-free campaign?
When an ad buyer calls up a local TV station rep and starts the negotiation process, they’re not negotiating how many commercials a client will get or how much money will be spent. They’re negotiating cost per point (CPP). How much does one rating point cost? Like almost anything, when you buy in bulk you get better pricing and TV is no different. When a buyer calls up a seller and says “I have $10k from the local Chevy dealer but I need a $16 CPP, take it or leave it,” the buyer is actually getting a risk free buy of 625 points if the seller takes the deal.
The purchased points are then delivered through commercials in various programs. For instance, if the buyer in our hypothetical deal above gets placed in an NFL game that delivers a 20 rating (20 points), the rest of the campaign only has to deliver 605 more points to fulfill the obligations of the agreement. If the finished campaign fails to deliver the 625 points and only delivers 500 points after the schedule has run, the seller has to make the buyer whole on the under-delivery by making up the rest of the points in a second campaign at no cost to the buyer. This is a “risk free” buy and it’s bad for a variety of reasons.
It’s obviously bad for the TV station because there’s no upside to the buy. If the campaign actually over-delivers and the buyer gets 700 points, there isn’t any additional money that gets ponied up by the buyer. If the campaign only delivers 500 points, the seller has to offer up free inventory to keep the buyer happy. This could put the seller in a supply crunch situation where they may end up crediting the missed points and giving money back. This setup will ultimately end badly for the buyers too because they never lose so they never have to improve their internal protocols either.
This agency edge is why buyers have no interest in changing the process. The sellers aren’t really in a position to demand changes to the process because there is too much competition for advertising revenue from the different channels and platforms. If TV sellers want the money, they have to take the deals and just hope they deliver the points. But I can’t stress enough, this one-sided relationship is from years of complacency in the TV industry on the sell side. TV sellers used to have something that every brand needed. Because of this, the money came easy because the audience was a slam dunk. Now, the audience is leaving and the money isn’t easy but the rules are still the same. TV sellers keep taking the no-upside business because they kind of have to.
The biggest problem though is this points structure doesn’t necessarily benefit the actual client. Because remember, the ad buyer is probably an agency buying points on behalf of a small business. The truth is, small business owners don’t give a shit about points. Small business owners want conversions. And conversions are ultimately the metric that prove campaign effectiveness. A campaign that delivers 700 points might not actually be as effective as one that delivers 500 points because points don’t factor in targeting efficiency and not every client needs the same thing. This is why buying an age demographic doesn’t make much sense anymore.
Fixing this mess would be simple but it requires an important psychological tweak; the agencies that run marketing for small businesses must start viewing advertising as an investment as opposed to an expense. They must view themselves as fiduciaries rather than as commodity traders.
In the end
To summarize this chapter as simply as I can; TV buyers and sellers haven’t changed the way they do business in decades. Despite the emergence of better data and better metrics to gauge the success of a campaign, nobody can get out of their own way. Buyers pretend they want sellers to improve the system (they really don’t because then they lose their edge). Sellers want buyers to improve the system. Neither want to actually take the necessary steps to change because change is hard and teaching old dogs new tricks isn’t likely. When you factor in that agencies charge clients for their services, it becomes even more evident that the client is ultimately the biggest loser in this.
Complacency and easy money. Years from now when we look back at why local TV news died, many will pontificate the reason for the demise. Biased journalists and “fake news” will likely get some blame. But that will just be low hanging fruit from political grandstanders. The biggest reason that will probably go unmentioned is the revenue model just completely broke down. And this is just the advertising sales revenue stream. Wait until we dive into distribution in Chapter 5.
Chapter 3: Time to Shit Your Pants, Mom
Being a promotions specialist in a TV creative services department was a bad fit for me. Coming from a production department, there were a few similarities to my previous workflow but for the most part the differences were stark and more abundant. In my prior role as a technical director, I was trusted with maintaining the operability of not just the studio and the cameras in it but also the control board and some of the other technical components of the control room. When I couldn’t address an issue on my own, I’d ask for assistance from one of our engineers. But generally speaking, I could handle the easy stuff myself. Studio light needed changing? I’d get a ladder, climb up and find the correct bulb needed for replacement. Chroma key not working? I’d adjust the levels myself. Microphone sound funky? I’d check the wires and the connectors for an issue. This all changed as a promotions specialist.
**Brutal inefficiency**
My very first day on the job involved paperwork and some training. The wakeup call really came when I was told by the marketing specialist who was training me that I had to ask an engineer to turn on the studio lights for me whenever I wanted to shoot a promo with an anchor or a reporter.
“That’s funny.”
Crickets.
“You’re joking, right?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Well that’s really dumb.”
“Yes it is. But the engineers and production team are all union members and it’s in their contract that nobody can touch a light switch, a camera, or anything in the control room unless they’re a union member. Your last station wasn’t unionized?”
“Nope.”
“Your old creative services team was lucky then.”
I remember the first time I asked one of our directors to turn the lights on for me. He responded with some sort of grunting noise. He slowly got up off his ass and turned a 30 second walk to the studio into a 90 second walk to the studio. My thank you was met with another grunt that lacked any decipherable meaning. I said, “look I’m happy to do this myself. I’m very capable.” Not an option.
I want to make it clear, I’m not anti-union generally speaking. I just don’t think that every industry really requires one. Firefighters and police, I get it. People who climb cell towers, I get it. If your life could end abruptly simply as a result of your day to day job responsibilities, I understand why you’d want to protect yourself. If it’s in your contract that only you can flip a light switch on, I lean the only thing your dues are protecting is your ability to collect a check. Not your safety.
Thomas Sowell says something to the effect of there are no solutions, only trade offs. This couldn’t have been more true in the environment I described above. The expense our company was willing to pay for this robust workforce was inefficiency. There’s a joke about needing more than one person to change a lightbulb. Among other things, the joke shows the absurdity of needing more than one person to perform a simple task that should only require one person to complete. Despite the existence of the joke, somehow needing two people to perform the even more simple task of just turning the lightbulb on was real life protocol. And to be clear, the light switch was ground level. We’re not talking about climbing ladders here.
**The job got boring very quickly**
To better explain why I even needed to use the studio lights, I’ll detail what my main responsibility was on a day to day basis as a promotions specialist. “Recruit to view” or RTV spots. I was in charge of writing, shooting, and editing our nightly RTV promotional spots. If you’ve ever watched live prime time television on a traditional broadcast network, you’ve probably seen them before. Usually you’ll see a newsperson or weatherperson pop up on screen during a commercial break to talk about whatever stories the viewers could expect to see in the upcoming newscast. The goal was to make the viewers interested in staying up just a few minutes later to see the story and watch our newscast.
“Tonight at 11, why experts say the price you pay at the pump could be on the way up quicker than you might think.”
“It’s the latest craze with teenagers but some are saying Tik Tok could be dangerous, we’ll tell you how after the game.”
Shit like that. That’s RTV copy and it’s what I was tasked with producing every day. The process would start with my attendance at the editorial meetings at the beginning of the shift. I’d sit there and listen to all the reporters give their story pitches for the day. Most of the pitches were awful for a couple reasons.
Our reporters just weren’t very good. I covered some of the big underlying issues for that already in Chapter 2.
Most small to mid-sized markets just don’t have a lot of legitimately interesting news stories on a day to day basis but they still have to fill up the same amount of time in a newscast as a city like New York or Chicago.
During the meeting, I’d listen to the pitches and try to think about which stories would matter the most to our viewers. If I had thoughts about specific angles to the stories that could drive more viewership, I’d be expected to weigh in with that information. From there, I’d return to my edit booth and work on other day to day maintenance tasks that required very little actual skill. Some of these tasks involved slapping our station logo to our syndicated daytime programming promos.
Shows like Rachel Ray or Inside Edition would send their own daily RTV spots that we’d broadcast to help drive viewing to those shows. We would put our logo with the airtime for our station on each of them so nobody could confuse the where and the when. A lot of stations in the country broadcast Rachel Ray, but they don’t all necessarily run the show at the same time. Because of this, each station had to add all their own elements. This is a job that can easily be centralized, but hey, the business is slow to adapt. That’s a general theme you’ll read about in several chapters.
Anyway, after the truly mundane tasks were completed, the “creative” aspect of the job began. I’d go back to my story pitch notes and start looking for sound bites and scripts from reporters who had brought back their materials from the field. I’d then write the copy for the anchor to read in the studio, hunt down a union member to turn the lights on for me, and then shoot the anchor reading my work on a small DSLR camera. From there, I’d put the clips into an editing software like Adobe Premiere, add any broll footage of the story gathered by the reporter, render it out, and get it into the log so the TV viewers of whatever prime time network show that was airing on that specific night could see what we had coming up.
After several years of this, you run out of different ways to say the same thing. Truthfully, I don’t believe any of it really mattered all that much. Most people who watch local news just want to know if they’re going to need an umbrella when they go to work the following morning. This workflow probably made a considerable amount of sense 20 or 30 years ago. But it’s not 20 or 30 years ago anymore.
**RTV epiphany**
The beautiful thing about writing RTV spots for broadcast TV is you never get to hear the viewers react to it. I’m sure everyone loved them. Kidding, of course. Luckily for us, social media exists and we know exactly how people feel about certain things. Writing RTV spots for TV insulated me from what consumers in my market actually wanted to see and read. We also had a digital RTV person. This person was much less insulated. I would occasionally fill in for the digital RTV when they were out of the office. While this only happened a handful of times, it was critical in shaping my understanding of the consumer market for local news.
The digital RTV person would do much of the same things I would do day to day but rather than writing copy for the TV audience, this person would write RTV copy for our Facebook and Twitter followers. The goal being to get our Facebook fans and Twitter followers to watch our newscast at 11pm. Every single time I filled in for this person, my digital RTV teases would get the same reaction from commenters online.
“Why can’t I just watch it now?”
The answer that couldn’t get disseminated to these commenters would have gone something like this: “well, because the sales department has told the advertisers who spend money with us that you’ll be watching it on our live broadcast rather than on our app or on this platform that we’re both currently using right now. Furthermore, we have a much harder time monetizing your attention on these platforms than we do on television. Soooo, we’d prefer it if you would just wait an hour and watch it when we want you to watch it so we can satisfy our obligations to our advertisers. Sound good?”
I don’t know how likely the average social media user would have been to wait to watch a news story on a completely different platform in 2015 or 2016. I’m pretty confident that the same social media user has almost no interest in waiting an hour for daily news now. If the comments from 6 years ago were indicative of the general sentiment from the masses, they didn’t want to wait then either. Surely that’s because the RTV just wasn’t good enough, right?!
**Meeting with the Bobs**
Every year or so we’d bring in media consultants to help us with our process and our strategy. The consultants would sit down with each department leader and go over specific content and make suggestions for changes. It was classic Monday morning quarterbacking. We would literally pay these people to come in, watch our shit, and then tell us why it sucked. Quality control is a legitimate goal. That’s not my issue. The problem with the Bobs was we couldn’t manage expectations. Even when we tried to do that, management would usually side with the Bobs because management was paying the Bobs to help. We needed to make damn sure that hiring the Bobs wasn’t a wasted expense.
*Side Note: We would pick and choose when we wanted to be sticklers about wasting money. Not listening to the Bobs = bad. Paying two people to turn on a light switch = good.*
In any case, when it was our turn with the Bobs, we would sit in a small room and watch the new RTV spots, general branding spots, and read digital RTV teases that we had created since the last meeting with the Bobs. We’d then watch RTV spots, general branding spots, and read digital RTV teases from stations in cities like Philly, Atlanta, and Tampa Bay. These are cities that are obviously much bigger than most American cities. They have real news every day. Crazy shit happens there regularly. Crazy shit doesn’t happen regularly in Lancaster.
Bringing up the theory that the best content from Houston might not be something easy to replicate in Des Moines always fell on deaf ears. After a couple of these Bob sessions, working hard to grind out content so that your boss could pay someone else a lot of money to tell you why it isn’t good became a pretty defeating process. Ultimately, the easiest way to make RTV better was to just make it seem like everything we covered was catastrophic.
**You’re all gonna die!**
We were fear mongers. There I said it. Nothing stimulated TV viewing quite like scary shit that made parents think their kids were in imminent danger. Whether we were talking about the heroin epidemic or parents getting in fist fights at soccer games, if it could drive viewing, we’d probably do it. There’s the old media adage that if it bleeds it leads. I’ll admit some of the most compelling copy that I wrote was making people feel like something was about to be taken from them.
Money and safety. Those were the two main things that people cared most about. And it makes sense. We would spend thousands of dollars on data and research trying to figure out what people wanted to get out of their local news. The problem with relying on survey data from active respondents is most people really aren’t honest with themselves. If social media has taught us anything, it’s that people want to project their best self. That’s why when someone over the age of 50 is asked how often they watch local TV news, they’ll probably say “everyday” even though they really watch it maybe once or twice a week.
Tell me you don’t like my firm, tell me you don’t like my idea, tell me you don’t like my fucking necktie, but don’t tell me you turn on the news every day because you care that the YMCA three towns over is opening up another location in 18 months. We both know that's bullshit. And if you’re under the age of 40, you probably don’t watch it all. And that’s fine. We didn’t deserve you anyway.
The government might be raising your taxes. The cost of groceries could be going up. Your 4 year old could swallow a button battery. These are the stories that resonate with people because their money and the safety of their family are at risk. You don’t need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on consumer research to figure this out. You just need to know some basic statistics in your viewing area and be able to think from the perspective of someone who isn’t yourself.
You would think these stories might not need fear mongering to juice viewing, but we did it anyway. Why? Because sensationalism sells. And remember the majority of a local TV station’s revenue comes from advertisers not from viewers. The advertisers are subsidizing it for you, Mr. consumer. We really want you to see what they have for sale. So we’ve sold you twice. We showed you what the advertiser has to offer and we sold you a news RTV that probably over-promised and under-delivered. This is only my second biggest regret from working in local TV news.
**The real bill of goods**
Using scare tactics to sell our content wasn’t actually the worst part of working in a TV news creative services department. Ultimately people can judge for themselves if they’ve been tricked and then they can choose to stop watching us. A totally justifiable action. What really became tough to swallow in the end was selling our talent. So much of local TV news is personality driven and brand driven. There are millions of people who have the physical ability to read from a box with a camera on it. It really isn’t that difficult.
Since we’ve already established that a lot of these people aren’t real journalists anymore either, the biggest differentiator for a good news anchor is likeability. As a viewer, do I want to watch this person? Is this news brand worth my time? The answer to each of these questions has to be “yes” on a large scale or your newscast has no shot. When I wasn’t scaring the shit out of everybody, a big part of my job was making these people seem likable to the viewers.
Remember the UPS guy from Chapter 2? The only reason why he and I even crossed paths was because I was filming an anchor talking to real people. I was getting b-roll footage for a branding campaign. You see, it was never good enough that we were out in the community talking to people and present at fundraisers. We had to make sure our greatness was documented so we could beat viewers over the head with it. That’s just the branding part though. Fundamentally, it isn’t much different from sharing that you gave blood or that you voted on Facebook. It felt less egregious pumping the brand than it did pumping some of the talent.
I can safely say that ***most*** of the anchors I worked with over the course of my career were decent people. But there were a few who truly weren’t. They didn’t give a damn about anybody. Not their coworkers. Not their viewers. For these people, the ends justify the means and it was win at all costs. The worst of the worst actually still reigns over her newsroom to this day. She’s a bully and shit disturber. Drama is currency and if you don’t have any secrets to share, you can’t be in her circle. And if you’re not in her circle, you’re probably a target of her aggression.
Numerous people left the company because of her and said as much in exit interviews. Yet somehow, she keeps getting more contracts and winning more Emmy awards. I partially blame myself for that. I guess the viewers like her enough. I’m sorry for that. If the general manager of the station had any gumption he’d have canned her ass a long time ago. But, as you may have already deduced, that station was (and likely still is) incredibly poorly managed.
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Coming up in Chapter 4, why the sales process in local tv news makes no sense.
Chapter 2: The Exodus of Talent
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.
**The pay seriously sucks**
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. https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/News-Reporter-Salary
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. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/07/the-most-stressful-jobs-in-america.html
**Stress from the job seriously sucks**
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:
a 2-year-old was shot dead playing in his front yard
a small child was tortured to death by his father while his tied-up brother watched
a baby fell out of a 2nd story window and didn’t survive
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.
**TV News viewers seriously suck**
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.
**Double standards seriously suck**
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?
**Buying awards seriously sucks**
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.
**It’s never going to be the same**
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.
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Coming up in Chapter 3, why working in a TV promotions department was eye opening.
Chapter 1: The Third Spirit
John Oliver has lit a fire in me. His **recent exposé** of sponsored content in local news media is wonderful. With the precision of a world class surgeon, he hilariously and accurately dunked on an industry trend that has been severely damaging trust in local news entities for the last few years. I loved it and it has inspired me to now share some of my stories about this business. With over a decade in local TV, I have plenty of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIi_QS1tdFM
I personally know a few people who have had to take part in these sponsored content segments that John Oliver described. I don’t think I’m betraying trust by saying it is a uniformly hated part of the job by the people who have been forced by corporate offices to attach their faces to bullshit. This hatred has been expressed to management. It almost goes without saying, but I’ll type it anyway: the expression of that hatred hasn’t amounted to any changes at all.
Truth be told, I have been working on a book about my time in the local TV news industry for quite a while. One thing that I have really been focused on is getting the distribution right. I didn’t want to release this through mainstream methods like Amazon or Books a Million. I also had zero desire to work with a traditional publisher or editor. And the notion that I might have to draw this out with fluff just to hit an arbitrary word count figure is completely uninteresting to me. In the back of my mind since I started this “book” I’ve been haggling with the idea that it wouldn’t even exist in a physical form at all. Instead, I’d release it completely independently, segmented one chapter at a time on a variety of innovative platforms.
This is obviously the distribution method that I have chosen. There are two key benefits to this. The first being if you enjoy it you can tip me for the time spent creating it should you choose to do so. Frictionless payment is a wonderful thing. The second benefit is I don’t have to play silly games. No Amazon algos to deal with. No begging friends to write reviews of a book they’ll never read. Perfect. Also, I put a tremendous value on the pseudonymous approach. While nothing I am sharing in this industry critique would be considered confidential, I just flat out don’t need the grief. I still know many in this field and I don’t want to damage relationships with people who I consider to be friends. And that would be a possibility because nobody likes hearing their baby is ugly.
That said, their baby is ugly.
**The epiphany**
A few years back, I was visiting an old high school buddy. Good guy, super nice. He asked me at one point, almost unintentionally crassly, “hey, you’re in kind of a dying business, how are you doing with that?”
I told him, “you know things are obviously changing in our industry but we’ve got this new weather app that’s pretty cool and the town seems excited about it.” He immediately said, “Alexa, what’s the temperature outside?” And wouldn’t you know it, that friggin’ asshole robot Alexa immediately responded with a clear and efficient local weather forecast.
Oh fuck.
This was an epiphany for me. But not in the way you might think. I already knew people my age and younger would never start watching live local tv news. This part was not a surprise. I knew at that time the only reason *I even* watched local tv news was because I worked in the business. The real epiphany came with that silly robot Alexa. Her response taught me something so simple yet so misunderstood internally; the CBS station down the street isn’t our competition anymore. Amazon is. Google is. Facebook is. We are not going to win that fight. This is probably why I have a personal disdain for each of the companies that I just mentioned.
Even after the epiphany that I described above, I still stayed in the business for a couple more years. I’ll show my naivete with this one but I actually thought I could nudge our internal decision makers enough to get some of the drastically necessary changes to our business model accomplished before it was too late. That silly optimism diminished after a handful of presentations and proposals to the management team. I realized the business was too big to pivot. There’s too much invested in old infrastructure and the old way of doing things. That, and most of the local TV leadership I encountered just isn’t very smart.
Local TV is a freight ship and I was trying to get us to maneuver like a speed boat to avoid a brick wall. The problem is the freight ship literally isn’t capable of turning in that way. It’s just going to crash. That’s all there is to it. When that happens, there will be pieces of the ship that can hopefully be salvaged. The kind of investors who buy distressed companies will likely be able to buy some solid assets and repurpose them appropriately when we see what is left after the crash. We’re probably still a couple years away from that. But it doesn’t mean you should stay on the ship to see how the crash goes.
The reason I say things like leadership “isn’t very smart” it’s because it’s true. That isn’t to say that I am so much smarter than them by any stretch. I just entered this arena far later than most of them did. That allows me the ability to view the business from more of an objective vantage point. Unlike most, I worked in multiple different capacities in local TV so I have a unique understanding of where the business falls short in a variety of ways.
**Who am I?**
I started working in local TV news well over a decade ago. At the time, I was in college and I was about a semester away from graduating. I knew my desired career path was broadcast media but my preferred medium was sports talk radio. I had hot takes. Don’t believe me? LeBron is overrated! Let’s argue about it for the next 45 years. Not interested? Neither am I.
My first job was with a small radio station located in a college town. That small radio station was part of a bigger media company that also had a local television news operation in the same building. It wasn’t long before I ended up moving over to the TV side of things and began working on nightly newscasts as a production assistant. This workflow is pretty straightforward. You can give it any glorified title you wish. “Audio engineer.” That sounds good. What I did was sit in front of a massive audio mixing board and control microphone, music, and tape levels to make sure everything that came through the board had a crisp, close to uniform VU meter reading. Plain English? I made sure the volume didn’t get too loud.
The board may have been intimidating to some, but it really wasn’t very hard to use. If you can handle the volume button on a remote control, you could do this job. You just had to mentally grasp that the audio board was essentially about 20 remote control volume adjusters built into one big table. That’s a bit over-simplified, but you get the general idea. The much more difficult position in a television production booth is that of a technical director. This is the person who switches the video feeds, moves graphic images from off screen to on screen, builds effects, and executes the majority of what you see on your TV screen during a live event like a news report or a football game. After a brief period working the audio board, I made the transition to technical director and I got pretty good at it fairly quickly.
**A new challenge**
Fast forward to 2014 and I was at a crossroads. I was entering my 7th year as a technical director and I was facing a potential departure from the business thanks to a relocation incentive that was beyond my control. Local television news isn’t like other industries. You can’t really move from one market to the next without a job already lined up with the hope that you’ll just catch on somewhere doing exactly what you were doing before. The way I explained it to friends was like this: if I’m in the restaurant business in Albany and my family moves to Tucson, odds are pretty good I can probably find something similar to what I was doing in Albany fairly quickly.
TV isn’t like that. In a normal mid-sized market there are probably no more than 4 local tv stations. Each of those stations may employ somewhere between 3-5 technical directors. That’s pretty much it. Point is there are maybe 20 of those jobs in any one city. Odds are not great that a technical director can move from one city to another without a job lined up and just get to work as a technical director with a different station right away.
After exploring the technical director job market in my new city, fears were pretty much realized. Nadda. Thus, the crossroads. Was my time in the business done? Would I have to adapt to a new role? As fate would have it, I did stay in the local tv news business. Though I had to leave production behind for good. I made the move to creative services and started a new gig as a promotions specialist. That role involved a lot of writing, shooting, editing footage, and doing things to help brand the station and generate viewership each night. I stayed in this role for three years and liked it for about one of them.
You get to a point in station branding where you feel like you’re writing the same thing forty different ways hoping for a different result that you know isn’t coming. Beyond that, marketing a TV station and TV talent always felt kind of icky. I’ll dive into this more in Chapter 3. After some time in the role, I started getting far more interested in the broad trends of the business and I convinced the station’s general manager to shift me into more of a consumer analyst position. This is a role that is designed to help local TV sales people sell advertising. I was in this role for 4 years and I liked it for about one of them.
**Expertise**
Production. Creative services. Sales. Those are the three areas of the business that I learned. They’re all very different and I’m thankful for those learning experiences. I’ve seen how the sausage is made, how it’s marketed and how it’s sold. Having a first hand understanding of each of these areas of the business has uniquely positioned me to be able to opine on what this industry is currently facing. Like countless other industries, it’s facing considerable disruption at this time. There is always opportunity in an environment challenged by disruption and TV news is no different.
Local TV news has one true core competency; making videos. At the consumer level, demand for video has never been higher. The problem is the local TV news business just can’t get out of it’s own way. The people running these corporations have no intention to make radical changes. They either don’t see the broken business model or they do but think they can coast to retirement anyway and let a different generation fix it.
I ultimately decided I couldn’t wait for the dead wood to burn down. I believe I gave nudging changes internally a good effort. I wanted the station to run things the way I felt they should be run. In hindsight, the expectation that a consumer analyst would or even *should* be able to push the kind of systemic changes I believe are necessary was a bit narcissistic. That is absolutely a *me* problem. The rest of what I’m going to dive into are legitimate industry problems.
**What next?**
Working in local TV news is not easy. Especially in the day and age of hot takes, social media, and fake news. I’m not by any means admonishing the national mainstream press for being unfair for political reasons. That’s a real concern and I think it goes deeper than just cable news networks. There’s big tech involvement there as well. That’s not what these chapters will be about. My only comment on that is straightforward; to a certain degree, local news media personalities have been punished for the sins of the networks.
Fair or unfair, there has been an all out assault on the mainstream press. Since most Americans are dumb as hell, local news figures have become collateral damage in the larger war against “the media.” I say all of this to preface that I genuinely do feel bad for the good reporters who have to deal with undeserved crap from Neanderthals who think they have it all figured out. It’s not warranted and I genuinely wish it would stop.
Since that’s out of the way, I’m going to spend the next chapter taking the rest of the “talent” in the business to task. I have never wanted to observe this whole thing from the viewpoint of someone who is working in the field. That inevitably leads to confirmation bias. How is this business perceived by others? Why is that the case? What are the consumption trends telling us? More importantly, what does this model look like five years from now? What can we do now to create the best possible outcome for ourselves? These are things that I tried to answer and strategize around.
Upon reflection, I’m a bit like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Ultimately, Scrooge has to be the one who decides to change. What follows is what I’d tell my 22 year old self if I had a time machine. Since that’s not possible, I’m telling you instead. If you’re in college and you’re actually entertaining the notion of picking this field as a career, these chapters are for you. If you’re an executive in this business who happens to be in a position to make changes, these chapters are for you. If you’re just an onlooker from the sidelines who happens to possess an inquisitive mind and you want to learn more about how all this works, these chapters are for you too.
For what it’s worth, I write how I’d talk if you and I were sitting at the pub with a couple of pints. If you’re not up for that, no worries, just stop now because it gets no better from here. Over the course of the next several weeks, I’ll be releasing this “book” one chapter at a time on platforms like Publish0x, LeoFinance, Read.Cash and Cent. I’ll share what it’s really like working in the business, deeper reasons why the industry is failing, and where the future of local news is ultimately heading. If you enjoy the journey, please share it with others and follow me on whichever platform it is that you’re reading it on.
@Crayban