It is time for local news anchors to get out of the chair and back on the street.  Back in the day, anchors reported all the time.  A relatively few do today, but most have turned into nothing more than news readers.  They come in late and read the news - and you pay them a lot of money.

News Directors have only themselves to blame for allowing this to happen.  Back when I was news director in Phoenix I hired a terrific hard-working journalist to anchor my main newscasts.  She'd been an anchor/EP at her previous station.

For the first few months she asked every day - "Want me to go out an report?"  But we usually had our photogs tied up on stories, and had planned nothing for her.  After a few months she quit asking and turned into a anchor in the strictest sense.  As the leader of the newsroom it was my own fault for letting this happen.

Well, we need to go back to the future when it comes to anchors hitting the streets.  With budget and staff reductions I believe the day of the "I only sit in my anchor chair and read the news" anchor is old school thinking.

The anchor of the future will report a story in addition to reading the news.  It is part of the next generation of TV news employees who MUST be multi-taskers.

Of course, the only ones who can make this happen are the news directors who let the anchors just sit in their chairs in the first place.   If you don't get them out of those chairs you are wasting a valuable resource in a sea of shrinking resources.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 11:04 am and is filed under Willi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.