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Men, Signing Off
So where have all the guys gone?
Many observers suggest that their departure reflects the transformation of TV news from a "glamour" business to a low-wage, no-growth field with limited career potential. With TV stations laboring under the same financial pressures as others in the mainstream media, men might be discouraged by television news and might be finding better opportunities elsewhere.
  In Washington, Wendy Rieger, left, and Susan Kidd co-anchor the 5 p.m. news on WRC. Having two women as co-anchors is not uncommon in local markets. (By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post) |
Although the rewards of making it to the top of the business remain great -- anchors make millions of dollars and reporters typically make more than $200,000 a year at the network level -- there isn't that much room at the top.
Fox News Channel, the top-rated all-news cable network, for example, employs fewer than 100 anchors and reporters. The biggest local station in Washington, WJLA -- whose newsroom is combined with cable's NewsChannel 8 -- has just 43 reporters, sportscasters, weather people and anchors.
Employment in the business, at all levels and positions, amounts to only about 25,000, says Bob Papper, a Ball State University professor who conducts the RTNDA's surveys.
As a result, newcomers tend to start their careers in small markets, at less-than-modest salaries. The median annual salary for a reporter working in the smallest third of TV markets is $20,000, according to the RTNDA.
From there, it can take years to climb to a larger and better-paying station. The heady days of the '80s and '90s -- when all-news cable stations were blossoming and broadcast stations were expanding their newscasts to more hours of the day -- appear to be over. For a young person, Papper concludes, "you could make the argument that it's [more lucrative] to go into the military than it is to go into TV news."
Given such conditions, Papper theorizes that women have a natural advantage over men on TV: "If you take the typical 22-year-old woman, dress her up and put makeup on her, she looks like an adult. With a 22-year-old guy, you can do just about anything and he still looks like he's going through puberty." As a result, a woman "can get a better job on the air and advance more quickly than a man," who may get discouraged and leave the business entirely.
A more important question might be whether any of this has changed what viewers see on the screen. That is, has the influx of women in the TV news workforce changed the news itself?
Although cause and effect are hard to separate, there's no doubt that the news looks much different today compared with how it did before women were a factor in producing the news.
"When I look back 30 years or so, to when my career began, there was so much more emphasis on officialdom and official process," says Barbara Cochran, former head of the CBS News Washington bureau. "Ninety-nine percent of the people we covered were men, and white men at that."
Nowadays, says Cochran, who is president of RTNDA, the canvas is much bigger, partly because of the influence of women: "We don't just do process stories. We do stories that tell you more about what it's like to live in our society. Having women bring their experience into play has made a big difference."
