Why local TV news has changed so much in recent years - and who's responsible

Back before I was involuntarily "retired," I always said that once I was out of TV news, I'd write something like an insider's exposé about all the things people didn't really know about the industry. I now realize I can't really do that because the industry just keeps changing.

However, I can see from the way people comment on social media that there's much the public doesn't understand about what's going on, and I believe I can provide some insight.

Over the past 10 to 15 years, ownership of local stations has been consolidated into fewer and fewer ownership groups. These numbers change regularly, but this is how they currently stand:

Think about that: Over 700 stations are owned by just six mega-corporations.

As each of these mega-corporations has grown, consistent with the fiduciary policies of the rest of American corporations (in particular), they've become much more focused on profit than the quality of their product. The result is that local TV newsrooms have been reduced to a shell of their former selves (I should also point out that these same issues are decimating local newspapers, too).

At the same time that the shareholders of these companies have drastically shrunk their newsrooms, they've also demanded that the ever smaller staffs produce more and more content. With greater demands on smaller staffs, these operations have seen a mass exodus of workers looking for less stressful, better-paying, and more promising career opportunities.

My former station has about a quarter off the staff they had when I first started there. Yet it produces six and a half hours of live TV on weekdays - less on weekends, plus ongoing website content, social media posts on multiple platforms, and what, for some strange reason, has become the most important thing - constant content for their streaming (OTT) platform... And there are other stations that produce more.

This is why the reporters and anchors you see - not to mention the many, many people behind the scenes it takes to produce television news - now come and go at an almost frightening pace. It's also why the average age of people at these operations has gotten lower and lower. By the time most reach their late 20s or early 30s, they realize that the profession they entered out of college with starry-eyed expectations has in fact, turned into a hellhole, and rather than burn out any more, they leave for greener pastures.

It would be hard to overstate just how thinly stretched these staffs are or how stunning the turnover rate has become. I say this because I want this understood:

At the local level, these changes and reductions are completely out of the staff's hands. It's the money-grubbing profiteers at the corporate level driving this degradation of a once-proud profession.

Local managers are compliant because, if they push back, they're booted out the door.

The people still working at these operations show up every day and work their butts off to continue to try and bring you the best news coverage they can with the limitations imposed on them by the profiteering shareholders. However, they can only do so much.

So when you decide to take shots at the people still working in the commercial news industry, give 'em a break, huh? Whatever lapses exist or stories or details are missed, it's not them - they're doing the best anyone can under the circumstances.

It's the faceless corporations they work for that are at fault.