27,605

July 17, 2013 Scott Jones

27,605.

Do you know what that number is?

According to the RTNDA that is how many people are working in TV News right now.

How does that number compare to last year? Down 48 people.

Dspite a better economy and what seems to be a lot more hiring, TV news is not adding jobs.

And one of the reasons why....all the consolidation or stations. You have seen it many times, a company that owns a station in the market buys another station in the same market. That company then merges the news operations and people loose their jobs.

The RTNDA study shows that there are now 717 TV stations originating local news ... running that news on those stations and another 235 stations ... for a total of 952 stations airing local news. That's down eight stations originating news from last year's 725, and they're running news on seven fewer additional stations than last year. Most of the stations that stopped originating local news are involved in some form of consolidation (so they're still running news), but some other stations that got news from elsewhere dropped local news completely.

The consolidation of media companies is shrinking the job market. The RTNDA says that the number of stations originating local news peaked in 2005 at 778. It's been steadily down since then. Some of those were marginal operations to begin with, but quite a few TV newsrooms have been subsumed in some sort of consolidation or shared services agreement. We're now losing TV newsrooms at the fairly steady rate of eight per year. Until this year, the number of stations getting news from one of those originating stations has been growing. This is the first year that list has gotten smaller. I'll have to see if that's also a trend.

The average TV station hired 5.6 replacements during 2012 and .90 new, additional positions. Replacements are up 0.2, but new hires are down 0.6 from a year ago.

Top replacement hires:

1. Reporters ... well ahead of #2.

2. Producers ... well ahead of #3.

3. Photographers ... well ahead of #4.

4. Anchors ... at double #5.

5. MMJs ... well ahead of #6.

6. Weather

7. Video editors and assignment desk (tied) ... about double #9.

9. A tie among: writer, sports anchor, executive producer, other news manager, web producer and anchor/reporter.

The only meaningful difference in that list compared to last year is that AP (associate or assistant producer/news assistant) virtually disappeared from the list this year.