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During a brainstorming session a few years ago, a room of TV executives shared their ideas and concerns on colored Post-it notes. Green notes were for revenue challenges. Blue for editorial strategy. Purple were digital opportunities.
But it was the red Post-its that dominated the wall. These were all the worries everyone had about hiring and retaining employees. The mass of red notes stood out like a warning sign amid all the other concerns for the industry. If we couldn’t figure out how to engage these people, we were sunk.
We informally called this the “people problem,” and spent two years building strategies and running experiments to address this challenge. We struggled. The declining industry, outdated ideas, and a lack of meaningful data left teams with little to show for their efforts. We needed a new approach.
A friend in local TV shared recently that their partner got a job at TikTok. “I used to be the one with the cool job,” he lamented.
One of our first people challenges is realizing TV doesn’t sell itself like it once did. Even if you worked behind the scenes, people loved to ask about the talent and hear the excitement in the newsroom. There was glamor to it all. There’s still some of that, but as our audiences shift media habits, our appeal to potential employees weakens. Our next generation of talent uses TikTok. Many don’t even own TVs.
The solution here is to lean into the underlying mission. Local TV newsrooms still inform millions of people