Broadcasting & Cable Magazine

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 2:31pm on Monday, April 6th, 2009

The era of the star television news anchor is over, according to an interesting story in Broadcasting & Cable magazine by Michael Malone on April 6, 2009:

"When he broke into television in 1985, WBZ Boston anchor Jonathan Elias says he viewed some of the star talent he worked with as "glorified meat puppets"-blow-dried know-nothings who rolled in just before their newscast, read through their script and delivered the news without setting so much as a single wingtip on the mean streets of the market. "I remember the disdain we had for anchors," Elias says, "their feet on their desks, rubbing your nose in it that they made five times as much as we did."
Twenty-four years later, Elias is in a position that most in local TV would kill for—anchoring the 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. news and reporting for the 11 p.m. at a network-owned station in a sophisticated Top 10 market. But he's hardly got his feet up. Elias' typical day sees him blogging, addressing viewers' e-mails, pitching in at story meetings, rewriting scripts, incorporating Twitter into his viewer dialogue and hitting the streets of Boston after doing the evening news to flesh out stories for the 11 p.m.

In short, Elias is using all available resources to gather news. “You've got to have a lot of tools in your shed to play in this environment today,” he says. “The days of minimal expectations are over—everybody's expected to be fully engaged on all fronts.”

With the local TV economy wheezing, the mega-million-dollar anchor, tasked solely with reading the Teleprompter, is going the way of the LP record and the thriving daily newspaper. In an era where content, not talent, is king, that giant salary is being put to better use in hiring a batch of hungry multimedia multitaskers. Those all-star anchors who have been able to avoid the sack thus far are often compelled to take on a wider range of duties and, with an “economic gun pointed at their head,” in the words of one industry watcher, do it for significantly less money."

Read the full story:
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/191239-Cover_Story_Dawn_of_the_Post_Star_Anchor_Era.php