Bob Papper of Hofstra University brought his survey of local TV stations to a state-of-the-media panel at the 2010 AEJMC annual conference, and his message was that things were not as bad as they seemed. Local TV news was still making money: revenue had slipped slightly, but so had losses, because of cost-cutting. News accounted for 45% of station revenue, a share steady for more than a decade. Employment was down 5.8% since 2007, which Papper set against the wider US economy rather than a newsroom-specific collapse, and the count of stations producing local news fell from 770 to 762 over 2009.
The more consequential finding was where the output was going. Half the stations supplied content to local radio outlets and to mobile devices, and 60% were in a cooperative venture with someone else. “The big picture is that the TV news department is not just on TV,” Papper said — stations had worked out that lost television revenue had to be made up elsewhere. Sixty-nine per cent had a three-screen strategy of TV, web and mobile, with TV still the top priority. Social media were taken up widely but unevenly: 67% covered it in newscasts, 58% used it in storytelling, 78% integrated it into the station website, and 38% of newsrooms used Twitter constantly.
TV news salaries rose 2.5% in 2009 while radio salaries were unchanged, though median starting salaries stayed at $24,000 in TV and $19,000 in radio. Papper expected more all-news digital stations and a rebound that would recoup the job losses of 2009.