An exodus of on-air talent has been rapidly thinning the ranks of local TV broadcasters from Boston to Houston.
Those left behind are struggling to keep up, former journalists told The Boston Globe about the city’s badly battered TV market.
Almost all said a combination of cost-cutting, layoffs, and resignations has left the industry in dire straits.
‘The stories felt the same,’ former WHDH-TV Channel 7 reporter Sabrina Silva said of what spurred her to flee the station in February for a new career in real estate.
‘I would go to one fire and I would cover it, and it would be the same script that I wrote on another fire a week ago.’
Silva explained how reductions in her newsroom made it hard to break meaningful stories.
‘The issue here was, ‘”If it bleeds it leads,” and I felt as though we were prioritizing breaking news that we didn’t have a lot of information on over stories that we had been working on for a while.’
The advent of social media and other sources of online news are also to blame, she and others told the Globe.
‘The stories felt the same,’ former WHDH-TV Channel 7 reporter Sabrina Silva said of her decision to leave station in February for a career in real estate
‘I would go to one fire and I would cover it, and it would be the same script that I wrote on another fire a week ago,’ Silva told the Boston Globe
Many said they still love the business, but factors like burnout and a lack of talented replacements for those leaving have made the hours and stress not worth it.
‘There was no respect given to veteran reporters like myself,’ said former WBZ reporter David Robichaud, who left broadcast journalism in 2018 after four decades.
‘They didn’t care that you’d probably been to every police station in Massachusetts and knew the difference between Gloucester and Scituate, and knew how to pronounce the names of those towns.’
Instead, younger, cheaper journalists are hired to fill the gaps.
Cost cuts brought on by technological advances and shrinking audiences have also made the job less enticing.
Liam Martin, a former WBZ morning anchor, left the station last year after four years due to grueling hours amid a revolving door of exits, he wrote in a Boston magazine op-ed.
A Boston native who landed his first gig in TV news in 2009, Martin now runs his own public relations agency.
Jon Keller was laid off from WBZ after 20 years in October as part of cuts being carried out by the station’s parent company.
Jackie Bruno, a longtime NBC10 Boston anchor and reporter, now runs a PR agency
Liam Martin, a former WBZ morning anchor, wrote in a Boston magazine op-ed last year how grueling hours brought on by a revolving door of exits in Boston’s local news market influenced him to start a public relations agency
WFXT-TV Channel 25 anchor Elizabeth Hopkins left the station in May
Just this month, Silva’s colleague Kim Khazei announced her exit from WHDH after 30 years to spend more time with her family.
Former WFXT-TV Channel 25 anchors Vanessa Welch and Elizabeth Hopkins have also left their positions, in April and May, respectively.
Welch now works a marketing and communications executive after 25 years as a journalist.
Christina Hager, a Boston-area reporter for 25 years, left WBZ last year for a career in marketing as well.
Jackie Bruno, a longtime NBC10 Boston anchor and reporter, also runs a PR agency after leaving local news in 2023.
Melissa Pagano, a former WBZ producer, transitioned to public relations after growing fed-up with her schedule in 2022, she told the Globe.
Meanwhile, markets around the country are experiencing similar issues, statistics show.
Full-time local TV news employment fell for the first time in more than a decade at the end of last year, a recent survey from the Radio Television Digital News Association and the Newhouse School at Syracuse University found.
Jackie Bruno left local news in 2023
WFXT-TV Channel 25 anchor Vanessa Welch (right) left the field earlier this year for a career in marketing
Houston, one of the biggest local news markets in the country, has been hit hard by exits this year.
And in Toledo, Ohio an NBC affiliate decided to move away from locally produced news altogether by shuttering two of its newsrooms in 2023. The station now delivers NBC programming with no local staff.
The model where stations abandon local news production while still fulfilling their contractual network obligations could prove more common as other operations start to loose money.
Layoffs occurring for years across the industry are sure to continue to test the resilience of local news in the coming years, as ad revenues and ratings decline as well.
