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.

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.