Former DC Anchor Talks About Life After TV (Updated)
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Former WTTG Anchor Laura Evans does not have great things to say about the mood and operations at her old station.
Evans worked at Fox O&O WTTG for the past 18 years anchoring from the news desk and working in the field.
She walked away from the station in December, breaking her contract after she said station management wanted her to work nights, shifting her away from her 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule.
As for the station. “Morale is at an all-time low,” said Evans.
And she puts the blame on social media and management.
The addition of a “board of shame,” an application that monitored and tallied how many times reporters produced content on social media, and how many likes and shares the content received, helped to spawn bad blood in the newsroom.
When she told her bosses that the app pitted co-workers against each other, she said they liked the affect because it spurred competition.
However, when she left Channel 5, she wept.
“I went home crying, my child said ‘why are you crying.’ And then I said ‘I left my dream job,” said Evans.
Her daughter replied, “Mommy, you made your dream come true. now you can do something else.” “Then I cried some more,” said Evans. “And there it was out of the mouth of babes, right? So simple.”
But the nightmare of working at The Firm lives on for many others.
H/T Potomac Local
Updated: Evans contacted FTVLive and claims that she never made the comment that “Morale is at an all-time low” at WTTG. She says that the local Reporter at Potomac Local " misquoted me, and that the tone of his article was highly negative and inaccurately reflected my speech, which had little to do with the station."
She said she, "asked him to change the headline to make it accurate. He reviewed the video of my speech and not only realized his headline was wrong but that in fact the tone didn't fairly and accurately represent my talk. So he deleted the article in its entirety."
The link to the story is now a dead link.
She tells FTVLive that, "when I did talk about the mandate to do social media in our newsroom, I was complimentary of management. While I did call it "the board of shame" because we all jokingly gave it that name, I mentioned that it did NOT create divisiveness in our newsroom, it taught me the importance of keeping up with social media in this industry and that it drew viewership, and when other stations saw how well we were doing as a result of our social media game, they followed suit."
She claims that the board "did not create divisiveness" as the article stated it did.
