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Dayna Drake turned 24 on the day we spoke. Friends planned a birthday dinner, but she wasn’t sure whether she’d get there. Although she was producing the 5 p.m. newscast, the nightside producer wasn’t feeling well, and if he didn’t make it in, Drake would have to produce the 11. That would mean another 15-hour day.
But she only had a week to go. A year and a half into producing at WCSC Charleston, S.C., she arranged a buyout with her news director and was moving into public relations.
“The news industry is not what I thought it would be,” Drake observed. “There’s less storytelling and more crime coverage. I’m not doing what I thought, and I don’t go home delighted at the end of the day.”
She’s not alone.
While the TV news industry focuses on declines in advertising and audience erosion, there’s a crisis inside the newsroom that’s threatening the whole system.
The latest RTDNA/Syracuse University Survey found that more than two-thirds of TV news directors say there’s more evidence of staff burnout than ever before. The problem is worse in small markets, where more than three-quarters of news directors say they have a real problem. But even in the biggest markets and biggest newsrooms – the top 25 markets – nearly 60% say burnout is a growing problem.
“They quit, they ‘quiet quit;’ they cry in my office; they call out more often than is usual for them; they complain to me and to each other,” noted