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Last week, TVNewsCheck carried two excellent pieces on the current employment crisis in television news. Both were good follow-ups to Emily Barr’s recent case for increased pay in news departments.
On Monday, Syracuse University Journalism Professor Bob Papper detailed the burnout issue that is front and center in newsrooms across the country. Then on Tuesday, recruiter Gary Brown talked about the industry-wide producer shortage. Like Barr, both Papper and Brown cited pay scales as important touchstones in what has become an increasingly complex issue.
As the newsroom crisis grows, companies are finding it harder to ignore the unrest in their stations. As Barr noted: “The best are trying to find ways to improve their benefit packages,” but “that does not replace the need for a living wage.”
How did things become so bad? What happened to the overwhelming hunger to work in television news? The simplest answer is that companies took advantage of that hunger by paying low salaries. After all, there were hundreds of applicants for every opening. Then one day everything seemed to change. The applicant pools dried up. The hunger to eat had superseded the hunger to work in our business.
Salaries are clearly the right place to start, but I think we must also broaden the conversation. Pay scales and hours aside, has something else changed about television news that makes it a less appealing career choice?
When I entered television,