Local television does not have a shortage of ideas about its future.
If anything, it may have more competing visions for the future than at any point I can remember.
Across the industry, companies are making very different bets about what comes next. Some are leaning harder into technology, AI and new ways of producing and distributing news. Others see greater scale as the answer. Some are doubling down on local journalism, sports and the strength of individual station brands. Others see opportunities well beyond the traditional television signal in new platforms, distribution and spectrum.
Different strategies. Different bets.
And all of them are trying to answer essentially the same question: What does a successful local television company need to look like five or 10 years from now?
It is the right question.
But after more than 30 years in recruiting and HR, including roughly 15 years inside the broadcast business, I think there is another question that deserves just as much attention.
Why should talented people choose to build their careers here?
Because while the industry has been busy reinventing the business model, I am not convinced it has spent nearly enough time reinventing the employment model.
And those are not the same thing.
The latest RTDNA/Newhouse School research should get everyone’s attention. Local television news employment declined again in 2025, falling 2.2% to 26,458 full-time employees. That followed a 2.9% decline the year before. The number of stations producing original local news also declined again, to 689.
New-hire volume remains historically low. Replacement hiring is far outpacing hiring for newly created positions.
And yet stations still reported an average of two unfilled positions.
Think about that combination for a minute.
Fewer jobs. Fewer people working in the business. Fewer stations producing original local news. Historically low hiring.
And jobs still sitting open.
That sounds contradictory.
I don’t think it is.
I think the labor market is trying to tell us something.
Local television may be eliminating jobs faster than it is solving its talent problem.
There is another part of the research worth paying attention to. When employees leave newsroom jobs, salary is the most frequently cited reason. Work-life balance is next. Burnout isn’t far behind.
People are telling us why they leave.
The question is whether the industry is listening.
I’ve spent most of my career recruiting people, and I have spent the last several years recruiting almost exclusively inside media. What I am seeing today feels different.
There was a time when moving from one market to another was simply part of a television career. You went where the opportunity was. A bigger market, bigger title or better station could justify packing the house, moving the family and starting over.
That calculation has changed.
Candidates are looking at the entire risk equation now. What is the compensation increase? What will it cost me to move? What happens to my spouse’s career? Can I afford housing in the new market? How stable is this company? Is this position eventually going to be centralized? Could consolidation eliminate the job? Could AI or automation substantially change it?
And if things don’t work out, what did I just uproot my family for?
Those are rational questions.
And lately, I am hearing them a lot more often.
I’ve watched qualified candidates walk away from opportunities — including at the offer stage — that they probably would have accepted several years ago. That doesn’t necessarily mean television suddenly has fewer talented people.
It may mean television has fewer talented people willing to accept the bargain being offered.
There is a difference.
For decades, local television had something of an understood career ladder. You learned your craft in a smaller market. You moved up. Bigger markets generally meant bigger opportunities, bigger responsibilities and better compensation. There was a reasonably understandable path.
That ladder has become considerably less predictable.
Consolidation changes organizational structures. Centralization can remove positions from individual stations. Technology eliminates some functions and creates others. AI will almost certainly accelerate that process. Management layers get thinner. Jobs that once existed in nearly every market can now be performed regionally or corporately.
Some of those changes may be absolutely necessary. Businesses have to evolve.
But when the employer changes the economics of the employment relationship, employees eventually change their behavior too.
That is what I believe we’re watching.
The industry is asking employees to embrace more uncertainty while often offering them roughly the same career proposition it offered when the industry was considerably more stable.
That math is becoming harder to sell.
And this goes well beyond the newsroom.
RTDNA’s research understandably focuses heavily on television news, but I see versions of the same issue across the station — sales, engineering, news leadership, general management, digital and operations.
Some of the most difficult searches I work aren’t difficult because qualified people don’t exist. They’re difficult because convincing a successful passive candidate to leave a reasonably secure job, relocate to another market and assume additional industry risk requires a much stronger value proposition than it once did.
That is particularly true in markets that aren’t natural relocation destinations.
Ten or fifteen thousand dollars more in salary may look meaningful on a compensation spreadsheet. It can look very different to the candidate being asked to sell a house, move a family 800 miles and bet several years of a career on it.
The candidate is pricing the risk.
Employers need to start doing the same.
This is also where I think local television needs to make an important distinction.
Recruiting strategy and talent strategy are not interchangeable.
Recruiting asks: How do we fill this opening?
Talent strategy asks: Why would the kind of person we want choose us in the first place?
That’s a much harder question.
And answering it requires more than posting jobs, hiring recruiters or increasing the signing bonus.
If the television station of 2030 is going to operate differently from the television station of 2020, then companies need to start defining what a career inside that station looks like.
Which positions remain local? Which become regional or centralized? What skills become more valuable? What happens to traditional career paths? How does someone advance? What should today’s 27-year-old journalist, seller, engineer or manager be learning if they want to remain valuable five years from now?
If technology makes an employee substantially more productive, does any of that economic benefit flow back to the employee?
And when a company asks someone to relocate and assume the risk of joining an industry undergoing significant structural change, what is that risk worth?
Those aren’t HR questions sitting on the edge of the business strategy.
They are business strategy.
There are also examples of companies trying something different.
Graham Media’s KPRC in Houston recently made a significant bet on a new kind of local journalism. Its ENOUGH initiative replaced the station’s traditional 10 p.m. newscast — despite the station having recently finished No. 1 in the time period — with a digital-first investigative and accountability product.
What caught my attention wasn’t simply the programming experiment. It was the thinking behind it.
KPRC didn’t wait for the traditional product to completely stop working before trying something different. It took a successful time period and made a bet that what viewers will want tomorrow may not look exactly like what worked yesterday.
There is a talent lesson in that too.
Innovation can create something employees rarely hear enough about in an industry dominated by conversations about consolidation, cost reductions and efficiency:
Opportunity.
The opportunity to build something. To learn something. To do the work differently. To feel like you’re helping create what comes next instead of simply waiting to see what gets cut next.
Sometimes the employment proposition isn’t just more money.
It’s giving talented people something worth building.
That won’t solve every talent problem. Compensation, career paths, stability and mobility still matter. But if local television wants talented people to believe there is a future in the business, giving them a meaningful role in creating that future may be a pretty good place to start.
My friend and fellow TVNewsCheck contributor Tom Sly recently wrote an interesting piece examining how several major broadcasters are approaching the future of local television. It got me thinking about the part of that transformation I spend most of my time watching:
The people.
There is no single blueprint for what local television becomes next. Greater scale may play a role. So will localism. AI and automation are going to change workflows. Sports will continue creating opportunities. Distribution will keep moving beyond the traditional broadcast signal. Technology will probably create businesses and revenue streams we haven’t completely imagined yet.
But there is another strategy that belongs in that conversation.
Talent.
Not talent acquisition.
Talent.
Who does the work? Why do the best people stay? Why do successful people join? What does their career path look like? How are they rewarded?
And perhaps most importantly, why should the next generation of high performers choose local television when they have more alternatives than any generation before them?
The companies that figure that out may have an advantage every bit as important as scale, technology, spectrum or distribution.
Because ultimately somebody still has to sell the advertising.
Somebody has to lead the newsroom.
Somebody has to cover the hurricane.
Somebody has to keep the signal on the air.
Somebody has to run the station.
And somebody has to want those jobs.
Local television is doing some serious thinking right now about what its companies need to become.
Good.
Now it needs to put the same level of thought into what it is asking its people to become — and what they receive in return.
You cannot build the television company of the future indefinitely with an employment proposition designed for the television industry of the past.
About Carver Talent
Carver Talent specializes in recruiting high-impact leaders across local television, digital media, revenue leadership, news management and broadcast operations nationwide.
We understand the media business because we work inside its talent market every day — talking with the leaders running stations, newsrooms, sales organizations and operations, including many who aren’t actively looking for their next opportunity.
In a media landscape changing this quickly, finding the right leader matters more than ever.
Ty Carver is the Founder and CEO of Carver Talent and brings more than 30 years of recruiting, HR, sales and leadership experience, including the last 15 years focused specifically on the broadcast media industry.
Before founding Carver Talent, Ty served as Head of Talent Acquisition for Raycom Media, where he developed deep relationships throughout the industry and gained a unique perspective on the people and leadership challenges facing local media companies.
Today, Carver Talent helps media companies identify and recruit management and executive talent nationwide, with a particular focus on passive candidates who may never respond to a traditional job posting.
Have a corporate executive or television station management recruiting need? Contact ty@carvertalent.com to learn how Carver Talent can help.