TV Stations Have An Incentives Problem. It’s Time To Ask Employees Why
TV Stations Have An Incentives Problem. It’s Time To Ask Employees Why - NewsLab
This post was originally published on this site
During a brainstorming session a few years ago, a room of TV executives shared their ideas and concerns on colored Post-it notes. Green notes were for revenue challenges. Blue for editorial strategy. Purple were digital opportunities.
But it was the red Post-its that dominated the wall. These were all the worries everyone had about hiring and retaining employees. The mass of red notes stood out like a warning sign amid all the other concerns for the industry. If we couldn’t figure out how to engage these people, we were sunk.
We informally called this the “people problem,” and spent two years building strategies and running experiments to address this challenge. We struggled. The declining industry, outdated ideas, and a lack of meaningful data left teams with little to show for their efforts. We needed a new approach.
A friend in local TV shared recently that their partner got a job at TikTok. “I used to be the one with the cool job,” he lamented.
One of our first people challenges is realizing TV doesn’t sell itself like it once did. Even if you worked behind the scenes, people loved to ask about the talent and hear the excitement in the newsroom. There was glamor to it all. There’s still some of that, but as our audiences shift media habits, our appeal to potential employees weakens. Our next generation of talent uses TikTok. Many don’t even own TVs.
The solution here is to lean into the underlying mission. Local TV newsrooms still inform millions of people
Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”