I was recently asked to come up with three significant challenges that I believe the broadcast media industry will face over the next few years. I’ll separate each into an individual post.
My first challenge: burnout.
A trend I have seen by those in broadcast television over the past several years is that talent is pretty much operating independently on social media, rather than together as a cohesive whole. Admittedly, I pay more attention to the meteorology side than elsewhere, but I believe the theme is still true for journalists. The expectation is that each person will be on 24/7, posting and sharing content morning, noon, and night. (An aside: I am fortunate that my station decided early on that we would have a main weather Facebook page where weather content would go and individual talent pages would be about us as “personalities.”)
With COVID-19 requiring a rapid pivot to being able to work mostly or even completely remotely, I fear the expectation will be that staff should be “on” even more.
This path is not sustainable – not for the salaries/benefits being offered. Unless an individual is really passionate about his/her work and fully dedicated to the field, it’s just not going to last long-term. Institutional knowledge will either be lost, or never develop in the first place.
“But what about personal branding?” What about it? That’s not a new idea. Walter Cronkite had a personal brand fifty years ago. To be sure, social media allows talent to express their personal brand more easily and explicitly. That doesn’t mean constantly pushing out weather content. Personal branding is about you. Of course the picture of your dog gets more likes than a map of a severe weather outlook!
And yes, the ability to more easily broadcast from home does have benefits. For example, if there is low-end severe weather when there is no staff in studio (overnights, weekend mornings in some cases), cut-ins from home can be a viable option.
But in the broader scene, there’s multiple staff to cover various times of the day and different parts of the week. Let each person own what they were hired to do. Doing differently strikes me as inefficient and a good way to push talented people to jump to other careers.