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.
