Author: Alicia Barron

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is the first of two articles on the newsroom recruitment crisis, which I believe represents a critical danger for the quality and ultimately the viability of local TV news. This week, I’ll look at why it’s increasingly hard for newsrooms to attract and keep promising new candidates. Next week, I’ll examine some steps stations and groups are taking or should consider to fix the problem.

What’s the biggest threat to the future of local TV newsrooms? The long-term challenge may be how to build a sustainable model around a new generation of consumers who will never watch a linear newscast at 5, 6, or 11. But news directors and their bosses are increasingly concerned about a more immediate problem: the pipeline of talent for both sides of the camera is drying up.

Ty Carver, who ran recruiting at Raycom Media and now has his own firm, recently published a long, impassioned screed titled “Extinction Alert?” — at least there’s a question mark — that sounds the alarm and calls for news leaders to respond on multiple fronts. “The television station stress level must be released…and soon,” he writes. “At all levels. Because trust me, some newsrooms are at a breaking point.”

“If there is one overwhelming challenge that I hear from every news director I talk to, it is that they’re not getting the same quantity of applicants for jobs that are open as we did maybe as little as three or four years ago. And they’re certainly not getting the same quality applicants that they were getting before,” says newsroom coach Kevin Benz. “It is truly the biggest pain point that I am hearing from news directors across the country.”

Lesley Van Ness, head of recruitment at Gray Television, has 200 MMJ (multimedia journalist) openings across the company. “So in 102 markets, basically every station is averaging two MMJ positions that are open, and those are the people generating that content every day for our audience,” she says. “It is our smaller markets that are really struggling, because they have a staff of 25 or less. So when you’re down two MMJs, it’s hypercritical that we fill those.”

“I’m actively seeking out news anchor candidates for five of our six stations,” says Michael Hammond, who recruits for Hubbard Broadcasting. “You might have trouble finding a producer, but news anchor is the top role you want to be in for most people in journalism. And the fact that we’re just not getting natural applicants is really unusual.”

What happened? The industry experts with whom I spoke are in remarkable agreement on what’s gone wrong. Here are the key factors they talk about.

Pay

Bob Papper of Syracuse’s Newhouse School has been studying broadcast newsroom salaries for decades and is the nation’s leading expert on the subject; you’ve no doubt pored over his annual salary survey for RTDNA. As far back as 1999, Papper compared TV news employment to “indentured servitude,” and he hasn’t changed his mind since. “The origin of the problem goes way back,” Papper told me. “What there’s been is no solution to it. For 10-15 years or more, this industry has grossly underpaid people compared to other options. And I would argue that the notion that this industry is going to attract the best and the brightest probably hasn’t been true for a long time.”

Check out this chart from Papper’s 2021 analysis and picture what it’s like to live on these starting salaries today — unless you already know.

“If you want to be a reporter, there are dues to be paid,” Papper says. “We exact a hell of a price, because we’re going to pay them maybe $30,000 a year to do that. Whereas they could take that skill set somewhere else for 45 to $60,000. And if you’re walking out of school with no debt, and you’re really determined, you can afford to do that. But if you’re walking out of school with debt, which is what most of these kids have, that’s an awful tough choice.”

To make matters worse, young people just starting out can make more money in supposedly menial jobs — one recruiter who didn’t want to be named mentioned flipping burgers at California’s In-N-Out chain — than taking an entry-level job in a local newsroom. My local supermarket is offering starting wages of $17/hour — $35,360 a year if you work 40 hours a week.

“I cannot tell you how often I am hearing from news directors who know that working at a restaurant, or at a fast food place, or doing some manufacturing job, those jobs are paying extraordinarily more money. We’re talking about 30 to 40% more,” says Benz. “You can go work at Target, or you can go work at Starbucks and get paid more, and they’ll pay you to go to college,” says Van Ness. “Entry level MMJs and producers are really doing a lot of the heavy lifting in those newsrooms on a daily basis,” she adds. “So then if they feel underpaid, they feel undervalued. They don’t want to stay.”

New options

Related fields are also a direct threat. “You can struggle for $30,000 and have three roommates and maybe get food stamps, or you can earn a good living almost anywhere in the country, working in corporate communications,” Papper says. Graduates of journalism programs are finding compelling alternatives to the newsroom, not just in PR and marketing but at companies increasingly interested in creating original content.

“Look, the education you get as a journalist is pretty significant,” says Benz. “And especially now that it involves digital skills and production skills and storytelling skills, those are very much in demand by everybody. Every major company in the country now has full blown media departments. They’re doing media and communications, they’re doing content marketing, they’re developing video and audio and podcasts. If you’ve got the skills, you’ve got lots of choices, and you don’t have to go out and have people yell at you and spit at you and tell you you’re fake.”

It’s not easy to admit, but local TV news just doesn’t have the cachet it once did. “I think that local television for years just had the mentality that, ‘Hey, we’re local television: build it, and they will come,’ kind of like the Field of Dreams movie,” Carver told me. “And we’ll offer a salary and somebody will take it. And for years, they put a job posting out and they would receive many, many, many resumés and have their pick of the litter. Today, that’s not the case.” Hubbard’s Hammond agrees: “I would say that television is no longer the bright and shiny object.”

The Bigfoot Factor

Because of the worsening talent shortage, larger stations are reaching lower down the food chain, snagging less experienced candidates who would once have been happy to find work in smaller-market newsrooms. That sets off a cascading set of consequences that is putting an even tighter squeeze on markets below the top 100. “And so this domino effect happens,” says Benz. “And when you get to the smallest markets — around 120 plus, 150 plus — there’s nothing left.”

“A good producer goes to a top 50 [market],” Van Ness says. “So how is someone in market 150 ever going to get that standout entry level grad from ASU, or from Mizzou, or from Syracuse? They don’t even look at our smaller markets. If you could go to Phoenix, you’re going to go to Phoenix over Sioux City, Iowa — no disrespect to Sioux City, Iowa.”

Hubbard’s Minnesota-based Michael Hammond used to recruit heavily from colleges like nearby St. Cloud State University, but now he’s losing graduates to larger out-of-state cities like Des Moines and Madison. As for candidates of color, who are in particularly high demand, “When I reach out to these students at virtual career fairs, if I can get them to even speak to me, [they already] have job offers from the national news outlets: Fox, CNN, MSNBC, NBC national in New York. So how am I going to recruit these students to go to Rochester or Duluth, Minnesota, when they have a job offer in New York?”

Ironically, while interest from big-city newsrooms may sound like a great opportunity for young graduates, the experts say that moving too soon to a large market can backfire. Markets like New York and Los Angeles are “not getting the quality and experienced candidates that they used to,” says Benz. “And so what’s happening is they’re picking candidates from markets who probably needed one more step.”

“It is incredible to me, honestly, how many bigger markets I’ve seen hire MMJs who aren’t ready,” says Van Ness. “And my fear is, when you put someone in a market they are not ready for, and they’re thrown to the wolves, no one’s gonna hold your hand, and you are just constantly criticized. At some point, you give up, and you quit, and you leave the business — and we lose good journalists.”

Quality of life

It’s no secret that the pandemic has triggered a massive re-evaluation of the nature of work across all industries, with many workers taking a hard look at the impact of their jobs on their other priorities. So many have quit that it’s being called “the great resignation.” But working in a local TV newsroom has always made excessive demands on your personal life.

Gray recruitment honcho Van Ness worked her way up from MMJ to anchor at Quincy Broadcasting but stepped away from the newsroom after nine years at the anchor desk so as to have more regular hours with her two young children, ages two and nine months at the time. Now she deals with the changing expectations of a new generation of candidates. “You have to make a lot of sacrifices,” she says. “You’re sacrificing hours working weekends, working holidays. I don’t know what the answer to that is, especially now in a world where news is 24/7. There is this constant platform that we have to create content for that is just never-ending. And I think that even creates more stress and pressure on people.”

“It’s leading to stress, burnout, mental distress, mental health concerns,” says Ty Carver, whose post begins with the story of a highly qualified executive producer in tears and on the verge of leaving the business altogether. Post pandemic, more candidates want to live closer to home or family or in cities where they feel comfortable. Gone are the days when up-and-coming reporters and producers would routinely move anywhere in the country every few years, working their way up the ladder. “They’re choosing to live where they want to live,” Carver says. “Next to family, friends, the restaurants they’re used to, the culture they’re used to, etcetera, versus playing that kind of the chess game that many in the industry were used to for decades.”

The “Snowball Effect”

These factors build on one another and exacerbate an already critical challenge for newsroom leaders, who are experiencing “stress and burnout” themselves, Carver says. “It’s a snowball effect. They’re already doing more with less people, and now they have empty seats. And they had turnover as part of this ‘great resignation.’ And it’s a self-perpetuating situation that is just rolling downhill and gaining momentum. And how do you fix it? Because it’s not righting itself.”

Next week, I’ll take a crack at answering that question. Our experts had plenty to say about the problem; we’ll see what they propose as solutions, and I’ll add a few suggestions of my own.

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[Author’s note: This is the second of two reports. You can read the first one here.]

Talk about hitting a nerve! Last week’s report on the “Local Newsroom Recruitment Crisis” is already on track to become the Knight-Cronkite News Lab’s most-read article ever. The rupturing pipeline for young TV journalists is a major pain point for news directors, and the worsening shortage of new recruits is touching off a snowball or domino effect — pick your metaphor — of stress, burnout and resignations among those who already work in the newsroom.

After last week’s story, I got a note from a reporter in a top 20 market that said in part, “I’ve watched many friends and amazing colleagues leave the business for the reasons you outlined in the article. We’ve lost so many good people. It’s not sustainable. Burnout is real.”

Melissa Luck, news director at Morgan Murphy Media’s KXLY-TV in Spokane, posted this reaction on LinkedIn: “When I talk to other news managers, the two things that keep us up at night are recruitment and retention. We have to take a serious look at ourselves in this industry right now if we want to keep building and innovating.”

They’re both right. This is a fundamental threat first to the quality and ultimately to the viability of local TV news.

So — what can we do about it?

There’s no single or simple answer, but here are six ideas for station leaders to consider.

This is the most obvious remedy and arguably the hardest to execute, given that most ownership groups are public companies with shareholders accustomed to historically hefty profit margins. For fundamental change to take place, owners would have to believe that the recruitment crisis poses a threat to quality, viewership, and therefore profitability in the long run.

But news directors can’t sit around and wait for that to sink in. Local TV newsrooms simply have to start paying higher starting salaries now to compete against other options in a tight labor market. “Everybody’s gotta live,” says newsroom coach Kevin Benz. “Station groups have got to look at where they are, what the cost of living is in those places, and make sure that they are keeping up.”

“We have to address the issue of paying entry level candidates better,” says Gray Television recruitment head Lesley Van Ness — and that’s especially urgent given how much the explosion of digital content has added to the demands on the stations’ newest employees. “Entry level MMJs and producers are really doing a lot of the heavy lifting in those newsrooms on a daily basis. So then if they feel underpaid, they feel undervalued. They don’t want to stay.”

Compensation guru Bob Papper of Syracuse’s Newhouse School says that if salaries remain relatively low, stations could also help with the crushing cost of college, as Amazon and Starbucks do. “You would think if a coffee shop could do it, that a TV station could,” he says. “If you want these young people to sign a contract for two and three years, for amazingly little money, why don’t you also pay some of that student debt that they’ve got to deal with that they can’t afford to pay off on the salaries that they’re getting?”

Speaking of contracts, independent recruiter Ty Carver caused a kerfuffle when he suggested in his impassioned essay on the problem that companies throw them out altogether. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “non-competes and contracts should be unilaterally dissolved and never used by any broadcast group ever again. Wow, yes I said it.”

Okay, that’s not going to happen. But Carver is on to something, especially when it comes to onerous non-compete clauses. “When you take some of these contracts, coupled with these non-competes, it’s handcuffing these employees,” he told me. “If you dissolve contracts, are you going to lose some folks? Perhaps. Are you going to gain others? Perhaps. It may be the Wild West. But what is the alternative?”

As someone who’s been on both sides of those boilerplate-laden agreements, I think there is an alternative — a radically different approach. Let’s reinvent the contract as an individually tailored exchange of commitments that goes beyond the usual terms and recognizes the employee’s long-term goals as well as the company’s obligation to help achieve them. The agreement should lay out both the current assignment and a path forward and upward on an aspirational but achievable timetable. Build in vision, flexibility, creativity, and mutual accountability.

When local TV news was the hot game in town and turning away dozens of applicants for every job, leaders didn’t have to worry much about “culture,” but as we’ve seen, those days are gone. “A lot of people in the business don’t realize that the old way is not the new way — and the old way doesn’t cut it anymore,” says [my former CBS News colleague] Marcy McGinnis, a career coach whose practice includes many local TV journalists and the people who manage them. “Young people aren’t scrambling to get to your station, and you can’t treat them however you want once they get there. Millennials and Gen Z employees are looking for a sense that the company cares about them as people, not just as people who get a show on the air.”

Amidst shrinking resources and growing demand for content on all platforms, today’s candidates are bringing a new set of expectations and putting new demands on newsroom leaders. “We have to admit that newsrooms, while being fun places to work at one time, don’t carry a great reputation for being great positive workplaces,” says newsroom coach Kevin Benz, displaying a gift for understatement. “Once you get somebody hired, you don’t want to have to do it again in a year or two years, you want to be able to hold on to them,” he says. “Culture has everything to do with that: creating a culture in your newsroom that is supportive, a culture of growth and development, a culture where people feel like they’re listened to, where they have a say in what’s going on, where they have some ownership in the work that they’re doing. If you can create those kinds of cultures, you can get away with a lot when it comes to pay and size of market, if it’s a place that people look forward to coming to work.”

Van Ness calls for “a culture where you are appreciated and valued, and also gets you on a path of advancement.” The key to creating that kind of environment is providing regular feedback, mentoring and training. “I can’t tell you how many MMJs I talk to who say ‘No one ever looks at my work. No one ever tells me “Oh wow, you did a good job.” I’m just turning content,’” Van Ness says. “I think it’s about just paying attention. People want to hear ‘Thank you.’ And they also want feedback on their work, and that really will keep people motivated to want to do better for you and for the team.”

Station groups all acknowledge the importance of supporting their young employees this way, but beleaguered news directors often lack the time and background to do it well — if at all. That’s why McGinnis says newsroom leaders may need some training themselves. “The first thing that has to change is mindset,” she says. “The mindset has to be about the people who you want to work for you, and the people who already work for you. It’s not about you, it’s about them.”

Graham Media Group has a “Boss School” for newly minted managers. “The first message,” says CEO Emily Barr, ”is ‘Don’t be a jerk.’”

If too much work for too little pay is driving talented people out of the business, or keeping them away from it altogether, is there a way to lighten the load, or at least make it feel less onerous?

Here are a few suggestions to consider:

● Spread the work more evenly around the newsroom, calling on veterans, including the anchors, to do more reporting and digital content creation. (We recently wrote about Scripps’s initiative in this area.)

● Take advantage of technology that makes it easier for newsroom employees to create compelling content, even with limited resources., (We wrote about Gray’s “digital desk” here and here, and we’ll report on an ambitious TEGNA tool in the next few weeks.)

● Strengthen collaboration across the group — not just content sharing, which is already very sophisticated, but group-wide projects that provide relevant stories for local markets and opportunities for localization without heavy lifting. (Here’s an example from Nexstar, and another from Gray.)

● Develop deeper relationships with grassroots news organizations and especially journalism schools to collaborate on story ideas and reporting.

● Extend and expand the coverage pools that sprang up during the pandemic, even among competitors, for generic video (like news conferences), saving precious resources for distinctive stories.

● Build up a beat system in your newsroom, even if journalists have to continue some general assignment work alongside their specialties. That will generate ideas for enterprise reporting and follow-ups that take some pressure off the desk and young MMJs.

● Experiment with formats that don’t require “feeding the beast” with fresh news packages in every part of the day. Raise the bar for coverage of routine stories that drain resources without really serving the audience. Instead, let reporters develop in-depth stories that they can “leverage” across your program grid and on digital platforms.

●Introduce more creative and innovative storytelling to appeal to the very people you want to recruit. (NBCLX, the NBC stations’ experimental channel focused on younger viewers, tells me it doesn’t have a recruiting problem. Just the opposite.)

In three words: do less better.

Diversity isn’t just a moral imperative: it’s potentially a superpower. But that means allowing diverse viewpoints and personalities to flourish in the newsroom.

“We just think if we sprinkle a few Black and brown people into the mix, that we’re diverse, and that’s not really true,” says Tina Martin of Boston University’s College of Communication. Martin, who hosts the public television program Local, USA and spent 17 years as a reporter and anchor in commercial TV newsrooms, says leaders have to be more open to perspectives outside their own experience. “It’s diversity and inclusion,” Martin says. “So the inclusion part is being able to say, ‘Hey, you know what? I have a different take on this story,’ or ‘I think there are some different sources that we can use for this story,’ and not getting that pushback of, ‘No, this isn’t what we’re familiar with. So we’re not going to do it.’”

“First and foremost, I think we need to cast a wider net,” says Graham Media CEO Barr. “And I don’t think we’ve done a very good job with that, particularly where it comes to people of color, because we’re limiting ourselves. And then we’re all stealing and poaching the same people. And the excuses — I’ve heard them all, and I probably made some of them myself — have always been ‘Well, they don’t have enough experience. They haven’t worked in the right places. They don’t know enough about this, they don’t know enough about that,’ whatever it might be. And the real lack of opportunity is no one’s given them a chance.”

Martin says that newsroom leaders have to be willing to hire outside their comfort zone — as opposed to “‘How comfortable do you make [the manager] feel?’ That’s really what it is. It has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with my ability, my talent, my journalistic prowess, none of that.” Her advice: “Get that whole concept of ‘Do I want to play tennis with this person, do I want to golf with this person’ out of your mind. None of that is relevant. It’s ‘Can they do the job?’”

“We all hire in our own image,” Barr says. “I think it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that we check our own biases at the door, and say, ‘Okay, why am I not willing to talk to this person?’” And that principle of “casting a wider net” can promote all kinds of newsroom diversity, not just racial equity. “We are ignoring a potential group of of future journalists if we don’t start to look at other places where students are going to college and may not even be aware of the value of journalism,” Barr says, “and that can be everything from community college to lots of state schools that may or may not have a journalism program, per se. But if you learn how to write and think critically, if you’re fundamentally curious, you can be a journalist.”

More eclectic and creative recruitment is at the top of Kevin Benz’s list too. “We’ve got to look for non-traditional places to find people who are interested in telling great stories. Who are the podcasters in your communities? Who are the influencers who always seem to be in touch with what’s going on? Who are the most curious people that are commenting and looking for the things that are happening in communities? How about partnering or looking for the small community newspapers, the Black newspapers, the Latino newspapers: they may have people that are very interested in going into the business.”

With respect for journalists at a low point among many Americans, newsrooms need to reach more deeply into their communities and especially schools to make the case for working in the news business. Journalism students are the most obvious targets for deeper engagement at a younger age. (We’ve written about Gray Television’s programs at two different universities to expose students to producing as an alternative to being on camera and create a pipeline into the company.) But why stop with journalism students? “Not as many people are even thinking of journalism as a career path,” says Lesley Van Ness. “And we need to start earlier and reach out to children in junior high or the high school level so they have it in the front of their mind more often.”

Marcy McGinnis says newsrooms have to find a way to sell themselves as a “cool place with a meaning, with a mission.” She suggests that stations take a page from the playbook colleges and universities use to attract applicants. “If you go on a university’s website, you’re going to see a recruitment video, you’re going to see a video about their facilities, about all the things they have to offer about different opportunities,” she says. “It’s all about what the college can do for you. Why couldn’t you just substitute the word ‘station’ for ‘university’ and do all of those things?”

I hope some of these ideas are helpful to you, and I want to thank the experts who helped me think about them. In reporting this story, I was surprised to discover that some of my most reliable industry contacts were reluctant to speak on the record. But addressing the local newsroom recruitment crisis has to go from hot potato to high priority — and fast.

Local TV stations showed during the pandemic that they are capable of transformative innovation at speed and at scale. Addressing this crisis will require similar patience, adaptability, determination, and ingenuity. The stakes are high, especially if you believe as I do that local TV news is essential to the future of journalism. “If we don’t have a strong, vibrant, independent, local press, we won’t have a democracy, because everything starts at that local level,” says Emily Barr. “If we lose that, in the TV side of the business, we’re not going to have anything left.”

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“This is such a tremendous opportunity for us to put a stake in the ground and say, ‘We do hear you, we do see you,’” says Vickie Burns, “‘and we want to super serve you: your needs, your interests, your curiosity.”

Burns, a veteran leader in local newsrooms in Chicago, Los Angeles, and most recently New York, where she was the news VP at WPIX, is talking about the new job she starts on Monday: SVP and head of content for Black News Channel (BNC), a fast-growing 24-hour network serving African American viewers.

“It really all comes back to storytelling,” says BNC CEO Princell Hair, “and that is telling those stories in your communities that are most relevant and matter to your audience.” Hair, whose resumé bristles with senior roles that include the CBS owned stations, CNN, and Comcast/NBC regional sports networks, took over a year ago and has wasted no time.

Hair has made distribution deals with cable, satellite and OTT providers to increase the potential audience from about 2 million to 52 million viewers, with more to come. In a relaunch in March, BNC, whose principal backer is Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan, added nine hours of live news/talk programming a day, for a total of 17 — from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. every weekday. And Hair has increased the staff from 55 to more than 300, including high-profile hires like New York Times columnist Charles Blow, who hosts a new prime time hour at 10 p.m. Hair’s goal is to have at least one correspondent in all 25 top African American markets — he has 12 more cities to go.

We generally write about local TV news here at the Knight-Cronkite News Lab, so why focus on BNC? As I learned in an interview with Hair and Burns, these two seasoned veterans, with decades of local experience behind them, have plenty to say that’s relevant to station newsrooms, especially as new generations of viewers seek out news that speaks directly to them rather than trying to speak to everyone.

Here are my seven takeaways from our conversation.

1. Identify the unique communities in your market — especially ones that feel underserved by what you’re doing now.

“We have learned over the years that the Black and Brown community does not feel that the traditional core media hears and sees and understands that community,” Burns says. “We’ve heard the research over the years that says we amplify the negative and we underreport or ignore the positive.”

This lesson doesn’t just apply to communities of color. Who else in your market has specific journalistic needs that you’re not addressing? And when you identify those groups, don’t ignore stories that report on solutions to problems and offer examples of achievement and hope.

2. Think of those communities as beats, and insist that your reporters generate original stories from the ground up.

BNC has 16 reporters in 13 cities with large Black populations, and when they’re not covering breaking news, they’re expected to come up with unique stories sourced from the street. We’ve written about similar approaches by the ABC owned stations community journalists and by the Spectrum News regional networks.

“With the people in the communities really being the ones driving the stories, we’re hearing things that we hadn’t heard before,” Hair says. “Ideally, on our best day, if we’re doing our jobs, our correspondents are coming up with stories that you’re not going to see anywhere else, enterprise stories that are going to really drive the conversation, whatever the conversation is on that particular day.”

3. Even your breaking news coverage should reflect those communities’ unique interests and needs.

“We have to cover breaking news. It’s the price of admission into our audience’s homes, whether you’re doing it nationally or locally,” Hair says. “We’re selective about the breaking news that we cover. We don’t cover every tree that falls. But whenever we do cover breaking news, we do try to cover it from the Black and Brown perspective.”

If you applied this filter to your breaking news stories — the ways in which they actually affect the various constituencies in your audience — how might your daily coverage change?

4. Apply the lessons of the pandemic to make better use of time and resources.

No explanation needed here: every newsroom we know is figuring out which pandemic-driven workflows (and workarounds) are worth keeping even as the crisis starts to ebb. “We have really leveraged the circumstances around the pandemic — that we could not gather in offices — to build a workforce that operates pretty well remotely,” Hair says.

Hair estimates that of BNC’s 300+ employees, about 100 work at the channel’s Tallahassee headquarters; 20 or so are in the Washington bureau; and the rest are scattered around the country, with no brick-and-mortar base. Nayyera Haq and Kelly Wright, co-anchors of The World Tonight, a signature BNC newscast that runs from 5 to 7 p.m. daily, appear from their home studios in two different states, with the senior editorial and production team in Florida.

“The pandemic really taught us to maximize these tools, these communications protocols,” says Burns, who’s bringing her local chops to the challenge. “We’re not local, we’re a national network,” she says. “But we are borrowing some structural things and some sensibility about how you make the most of your resources from local.”

5. Build mentoring into your newsroom culture.

Mentoring happens informally in most newsrooms and formally in some. At BNC, it’s considered part of the mission. “We’re training the next generation of Black journalists,” Hair says, “and that’s an important part of what we do here as well: how these people grow, and how we impact them, as journalists, over their career.”

While this may sound too touchy-feely for some newsroom managers, I would argue that a reputation for active mentoring is good for recruitment and retention, not to mention the ongoing vitality of local news (and your particular ownership group).

6. Build in community impact as a measure of your success.

We heard this recently from Stacy Owen, GM of NBC Bay Area: she uses impact as a key performance indicator, along with more conventional metrics like ratings. Ditto for BNC, which emphasizes reporting not just on problems affecting African Americans but also their achievements. Here’s how Princell Hair puts it: “We’re trying to bring attention to a community that has been underserved and largely ignored forever. And I think that when we start to see some of these more obvious outward results of our reporting, our storytelling, that to me will be success.”

The pandemic brought out the best in local newsrooms, which rose to serve their audiences with life-saving information. Assuming that enhanced emphasis on community service survives COVID, now might be a good time to figure out how to measure the results — and bake those expectations into your ongoing work.

7. Express your unique value in everything you do.

This takeaway runs somewhat counter to the notion of local broadcasting — something for everyone, or all things to all people. But as the media marketplace fragments and users take sole control of their news, information and entertainment menus, I predict newsrooms will start targeting specific audience segments with more distinct value propositions. Maybe not quite narrowcasting: let’s call it smartcasting.

That’s easier for BNC, whose content is aimed squarely at Black news consumers. The channel even has a manifesto that proclaims its principles (see above). But what is the opportunity in your market to “smartcast” for the individual communities within it? And how might you define yourselves around a unique value that your newsroom can provide?

“You have to have a direction that defines your brand that isn’t a slogan, that can be lived in every part of what you program, from your news, to your marketing, to your whatever,” Vickie Burns says. “And I think that that is the opportunity for BNC: to define ourselves and our mission to super serve this community, and then refine and define that so that we live it in every part of the day, and in every stratum of the content that we’re going to create.”

What’s the vision that defines your newsroom?

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As I write this, Kamala Harris has just been inaugurated as the first woman and first person of color to serve as vice president. That is an inspiring sign of progress — but it’s also a reminder of how challenging it is to increase racial diversity in the highest ranks of leadership.

Sadly, the television station business stands as a sobering example. “The best candidates of color certainly want a great place to work and where the journalism is great,” says Jordan Wertlieb, president of Hearst Television. “But they also want to see a management team that reflects them. And I’ve said this publicly: Shame on the broadcast industry.”

According to RTDNA research released last fall, “general managers are less racially and ethnically diverse than last year [2019]. Just 7.1% of general managers are people of color, down from 10.3% last year.” Wertlieb estimates fewer than 20 stations have Black general managers. “And that’s a staggering number, if you think about it, with all the broadcast television stations that are in the country.”

“When I go back to Emma’s purpose, it wasn’t just about having talent in front of the camera. But it was also ensuring that we were in decision-making roles behind the camera,” says Nikki Bethel, president and CEO of the Emma Bowen Foundation, which has been placing talented students of color in multi-year paid internships in media and tech companies for more than three decades. “If you have no senior leaders of color in the newsroom, on the ground, out in the field, then are you really serious about what you say you’re talking about? Show that you believe it by putting your money where your mouth is and hiring people who look like me in positions of authority, and then allow me to sit next to them. No matter how young I might be, no matter how inexperienced I might be, it has to start somewhere.”

The foundation has placed more than 1,400 interns over the years — alums who form a growing network that’s a potential resource for the next generation of newcomers, for companies eager to draw on it, and for the foundation itself. “As the network grows, we keep our ear to the ground around what is the culture and the climate like,” Bethel says. “And culture and climate, though they are complementary, are two different things: Culture is set by the C-suite, climate is how you feel on the ground.”

Jordan Wertlieb and his team in the “C-suite” at Hearst Television are longtime Emma Bowen partners. Nine Bowen alums are working at Hearst stations now. The executives agreed to talk with me about what it takes to change both culture and climate: to move more diverse candidates not just through the door but up the ladder. “Let’s be clear and be careful. There aren’t quotas,” Wertlieb says. “But it’s a numbers game. So if you fill up more of the producer ranks and more of the sales ranks with diversity, if we’re pushing them towards more training and more mentorship and more exposure, then they naturally progress into department head level. And then they naturally progress into a general manager.”

Watch a Hearst video celebrating its Emma Bowen alums.

Hearst has multiple initiatives to help address this goal, all of which were underway before last year’s nationwide reckoning on racial inequity. In May of 2018, Human Resources SVP Katherine Barnett presented every GM in the group with statistics comparing diversity at their stations with the populations they serve in their markets. “The GMs were already focused on it,” Barnett says, “but this really punctuated it for them when we held the mirror up in front of them. It was just further fuel in their tank to continue to move the needle.”

The company has a program to recruit military veterans, a naturally diverse pool from which to draw. There have been 51 hires in five years. In addition, since 2014, the Fred Young Television Producing Fellowship has been plucking promising producer candidates right from college for 10 weeks of training and then putting them to work at Hearst stations. “While it is not defined as a minority fellowship, it has evolved [so that] about 50% of our fellows have been people of color,” says News SVP Barb Maushard. “And the majority of those fellows are still moving through the company.”

A year ago, Hearst appointed its first director of talent recruitment, Sinan Sadar, a former news director and veteran of three Hearst stations whose brief includes increasing diversity across the company’s 26 news markets. Even before taking on his new job, the gregarious Sadar had a reputation for connecting people with the right station in the company: Wertlieb calls him “the Swiss Army Knife” of mentorship. “I think it’s just trying to broaden our pipeline and our funnels at the entry-level stage and at the mid-level stage — bringing in the people that will eventually move to department head and more senior positions,” Sadar says. “We think this is the time that, especially in my role, you can help amplify that and increase the aggression. Because there’s a way to go.”

“We have allowed [mentorship] to just be organic and natural up until now,” Katherine Barnett says, “but now we’re ready to put some more formality and structure to it. And we have solicited all of our general managers initially to suggest to us individuals who could be mentors and individuals who would like to be a mentee — and at all levels, not just entry level.”

The executives say that an ironic outcome of the pandemic is more face-to-face contact with and among employees, albeit virtually, and the ability to match people by shared experience rather than by proximity. “It’s giving us a plethora of combinations that we never had before,” Wertlieb says. “There’s not a criterion other than saying, ‘You know what? That person, that department head has had a pretty similar path as what we’re trying to do here with this person. Why don’t we connect them?’” Just one example: Anel Disla, who helps run creative services at WPBF-TV in West Palm Beach, is now mentoring Michée Mande, a newly minted promotion producer at Sacramento’s KCRA-TV. (Both are Emma Bowen alums.)

Barb Maushard also hopes to expose mentees to a more diverse array of talents within the company — and perhaps reap some unexpected rewards, “With some of these more formalized mentorship programs that we’re working on, I think we’re going to find different people from very different disciplines getting mixed together and figuring out what some of the skill sets are that we might not have otherwise known about,” Maushard says.

Nikki Bethel of the Emma Bowen Foundation agrees that a formal mentorship program is essential to generate more newsroom and station leaders of color, and she hopes that her growing network of alums can help.”It’s one thing to hire, it’s another to retain,” Bethel says. “You retain folks that are a part of this community by aligning them with other individuals who’ve walked the path they think they want to walk. You put them in touch with people who can say, ‘Been there, done that. This was my walk. Here are my wins, here are some failures.’ All things and roads lead back to mentorship.”

Jordan Wertlieb says the road to a general manager’s office at Hearst is a “10-year journey.” He’s proud to have the three Black GMs on his team — WDSU’s Joel Vilmenay in New Orleans, KOAT’s Lori Waldon in Albuquerque, and WJCL’s Ben Hart in Savannah — but rather than try to speed that process up (and set people up to fail), Wertlieb and his team are moving aggressively to bring in more people of color and support them through the ranks.

It’s not just up-and-coming employees who are on a “journey” either — the management team must be as well. And the first step is to recognize that waiting for change to happen on its own won’t work. “You’ve got to walk the walk,” Wertlieb says. “You’ve got to point out to these candidates, ‘There’s no ceiling: You can run a television station, you can go to the corporate level.’ So what the industry has to do is start demonstrating more successes in the levels you’re talking about. And then your pipeline will get better.”

Editor’s Note: Every station group is trying to meet the challenges of diversity, equity and inclusion in its own way, and we’re interested in what your company is doing to change the equation. Please share your story with us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

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