Washington Post: Men, Signing Off

[bigtalkradiofan]

Similar phenomenon in radio news? If so, implications for radio news, and N/T more generally?


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072100295.html

Men, Signing Off
As More Women Become TV Anchors and Reporters, Males Exit the Newsroom

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 23, 2006; Page N01

As the news director of WTTG-Fox5, Katherine Green gets stacks of tapes and résumés from reporters and anchors who want to work in her newsroom. Some applicants are young and green, some older and seasoned. But the most common characteristic is: Most are women.

By Green's estimate, women applicants outnumber men about 3 to 1. Bill Lord, Green's counterpart at WJLA (Channel 7), sees much the same ratio, and he says the percentage of women has increased year by year.

"It's actually more difficult now to find a strong male anchor than a strong female," Green says. "Why? I'm not really sure I can answer that."

People in the TV news business have been wondering the same thing. ...

[Click link above for the complete Washington Post newspaper article.]

 

[bigtalkradiofan]

Also, related accompanying article:


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072100307.html

New Face of TV News First Seen in the '70s

Sunday, July 23, 2006; Page N02

Women are familiar faces on the news, but that wasn't always the case. Network and local newscasts seemed to discover them all at once starting in the early 1970s, when they became reporters and anchors in city after city.

Before then, women played a limited role in TV news. For many years, stations had employed "weather girls" to "brighten up" the daily forecast, but had rarely entrusted women with the symbolically important job of reporting the news. And anchoring -- TV's embodiment of authority and credibility -- was widely perceived as work only a man could handle. In 1971, Reuven Frank, the late president of NBC News, told Newsweek, "I have the strong feeling that audiences are less prepared to accept news from a woman's voice than from a man's." ...

[Click link above for the complete Washington Post newspaper article.]

 

[Bob_Hudson]

This sounds similar to what happened in the public relations business, beginning in the 1980's: it increaasingly became a place where the majority of new hires were women. All other considerations aside, one result of that was lower overall salaries. I would guess that for the average radio or TV news person who is not the star anchor, salaries have been at best stagnant and in many cases are less than they used to be. I know that my last radio news gig in San Diego was an AFTRA union gig and it basically paid about what I made at an AFTRA news gig in San Diego 20 years previously. I saw something recenty about a station in the Monterey, California market seeking a news director for $2,000 a month! These have become the kinds of jobs someone takes solely to put their communications degree to work, not to support a family: you really need a husband (or a wife) with a good job in order to afford to work in radio news, especially, these days (although one of the stories linked to above, notes that small TV markets will pay reporters perhaps $20K a year).


The story also notes that men pretty much don't major in broadcast communications. Apparently men are doing a better job of analyzing the field when making education choices Really, broadcast journalism (and much of it is not real journalism) is not a great field to enter these days and the only real motivation is that some old lady will stroke your ego by recognizing you at the supermarket.

 

[MightyFrenchman]

I saw something recenty about a station in the Monterey, California market seeking a news director for $2,000 a month! These have become the kinds of jobs someone takes solely to put their communications degree to work, not to support a family: you really need a husband (or a wife) with a good job in order to afford to work in radio news, especially, these days (although one of the stories linked to above, notes that small TV markets will pay reporters perhaps $20K a year).

Really, broadcast journalism (and much of it is not real journalism) is not a great field to enter these days and the only real motivation is that some old lady will stroke your ego by recognizing you at the supermarket.

This is the way ANY job in radio has always been. The only place in radio where one can make enough money to support a family is either in sales or engineering.

 

[Bob_Hudson]

I saw something recenty about a station in the Monterey, California market seeking a news director for $2,000 a month! These have become the kinds of jobs someone takes solely to put their communications degree to work, not to support a family: you really need a husband (or a wife) with a good job in order to afford to work in radio news, especially, these days (although one of the stories linked to above, notes that small TV markets will pay reporters perhaps $20K a year).

Really, broadcast journalism (and much of it is not real journalism) is not a great field to enter these days and the only real motivation is that some old lady will stroke your ego by recognizing you at the supermarket.

This is the way ANY job in radio has always been. The only place in radio where one can make enough money to support a family is either in sales or engineering.

Into the 80's at least, jocks in many large markets could in fact buy a house and support a family on AFTRA scale wages. But things really started to change in the late 70's and early 80's as FM took over: most AM/FM combos had no AFTRA agreements for their FM's and the independent FM's certainly had no union agreements. Thus, they were free to pay less money and they did. In 1979 I was working on the #1 rated afternoon show which was on an FM: I got a chance to go to a former powerhouse AM that had very little ratings, but it was union: my pay doubled. Of course the FM's had no problem finding people willing to work for low wages just for the exciting opportunity to be on the radio.