The Job is Just Not That Great Anymore
/
When Mark Armstrong took over as the sports anchor at WTVD in 2004, he fired his agent not long after he arrived in Raleigh. There was no other television job he wanted. It’s probably the last one he’ll have.
Tonight, Armstrong will anchor his last sportscast at the station.
He says leaving the business entirely, trying to stay ahead of a national and local trend among TV stations moving away from sports coverage.
Armstrong watched in 2019 as WRAL terminated sports anchor Jeff Gravley’s contract early after two stints with the station that lasted 30 years and offered him a cut-rate deal to stay that he turned down. While Armstrong’s contract runs through October, he’s leaving now and buying a Wow 1 Day Painting franchise here.
“I feel like I’ve lived the dream of this business,” Armstrong said. “It’s what I thought it would be when I was a kid, when I was a TV intern. I’ve been so blessed to have so many amazing experiences. But the nature of the business has just changed so much that a lot of the greatest parts of it are not so great anymore, and a lot of the fun has been sapped out of it.”
The News-Observer reports that other local stations have cut back on sports and staffing as well. Turnover is high. It seems crazy that in a sports-mad area like the Triangle, doing less sports would be a business strategy, but it’s a growing trend in the TV business — and this market is not immune.
“There’s just not any importance placed on local sports now by the people who are in charge of hiring people to cover local sports,” Armstrong said. “I don’t want this in any way to sound like I’m bitter at ABC11, because I’m not. I’m so thankful to them for giving me the opportunity, for hiring me to come down here and live the dream for 17 years covering this amazing sports town. I just feel like there’s nothing ahead of me that could possibly be as cool as what I’ve already covered, and the runway, after what happened to Jeff at WRAL, for me was going to be getting shorter and shorter.”
