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.
