A little while ago, I wrote a post titled NBC News. Fox News. What’s the difference? about how FOX and NBC in Philadelphia were planning to share their news gathering program. My conclusion was that it was being done to save money in a soft economy, but would only continue the trend of shrinking numbers of television news jobs. And, I was right. I told you so.
Michael Klein of the Philladelphia Inquirer and philly.com included some notes about the Philadelphia media industry in his latest column. It includes notes about job cuts in both TV and radio. What did Klein reference as a reason for the upcoming layoffs?
“Every week seems to bring another notch of belt-tightening. Two weeks ago, NBC10 and Fox29 announced they’d pool routine video and helicopter time.”
I’ll say it again. Told you so.
Not that it was hard to predict. The number of available jobs is shrinking everywhere in the television industry. Television stations are being asked to do more (especially with multimedia) without being given more funding for new staff. Some are even loosing funding. If TV station owners keep up this trend of not spending on their historically profitable TV assets, we are going to see more of these job cuts and more of these news gathering partnerships.
Philadelphia is my case in point. They are market number 4 out of 210, and yet Klein reports:
“Reporters and anchors are being offered pay cuts. Slots are going unfilled. There have been no direct hires to replace the four local anchors who left ingloriously this year: NBC10’s Vince DeMentri and Lori Delgado and CBS3’s Alycia Lane and Larry Mendte. Lane-Mendte were making a combined $1.5 million, while successors Chris May and Susan Barnett, already on the CBS3 staff, probably are making half that. May, incidentally, was brought in after Mar Howard’s retirement to fill his $800,000-a-year anchor seat.”
1 Comment
December 4, 2008 at 3:04 pm
[...] the first change will be one just like what I last wrote about in I told you so Philadelphia, that is, a resource sharing program with FOX News. Variety thinks, like I do, that this program [...]