Any longtime reader of FTVLive knows that I have been pushing for a change in the corner offices of TV stations for years.

Look at your News Director’s office, it is a good bet that there is a white guy sitting in there.

Now go look in your General Manager’s office, it is even a better bet there is a white guy sitting in there.

We keep talking about a need for change, but yet it doesn’t happen.

You look at the staff of a TV station and most often you see a diverse staff on air. But, you look at management, and seeing diversity is much harder to find. When those GM jobs or ND jobs come open, time, and time again it is filled with a white guy.

This needs to change. Companies need to look at putting minorities and women in those jobs. Don’t tell me that people like that are hard to find. Find them, grow them.

If you don’t give these people a chance to move up the ladder, you make them harder to find.

How many black EP’s or Managing Editors are working in newsrooms. I’ll tell you, not nearly enough. I know of a number of black producers, but not EP’s.

You need to work with these Producers, help them, and then promote them to the EP job when it opens up. That way, their next step after that is News Director.

Often times the General Manager of a TV station is a person promoted from the General Sales Manager position.

As a news guy, I’m often not a fan of salespeople, but they are the ones getting the GM jobs more often than not.

During my years in TV news, I worked at 10+ TV stations and every single one of those stations had a white General Sales Manager. I can only think of two times I even saw a black person working in sales at a station.

I saw few women working as the Local Sales Manager, but they never seemed to get that bump up to GSM.

This Reporter in Paduch, Kentucky felt she needed to speak up in her morning meeting and FTVLive commends her for doing so.

Sadly, she shouldn’t have had to do this, this should have been handled a long time ago. Maybe now, we can finally get around to this.