As viewers have left, the network news divisions have shrunk in size. And the priorities about where money goes have shifted. In the process so has the culture of network newsgathering. What once could be described as organizations with large battalions of experienced correspondents, producers, editors and camera crews stationed in bureaus worldwide might better be characterized today as organizations with a small pool of high-priced anchors supported by less experienced, less well-known, correspondents and off-air staffers who can parachute in from afar or assemble satellite footage in New York and cover anything.
Some trends:
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Staff cuts, some severe, have hit all of the big three news divisions, forcing a smaller number of correspondents to produce the same number or more stories.1 [1]
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Bureaus, particularly overseas, have been closed, giving the news organizations a smaller global footprint and fewer staff members with the understanding that comes from having correspondents immersed in foreign cultures.
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Many of the correspondents who have left are those with the longest experience and greatest expertise.
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The news hole for both morning and evening newscasts is shrinking as time for advertising grows.2 [2]
Staffing
A look at the average network newsroom is the most fundamental way to understand what has happened to investment in the newsroom. News staffs have shrunk markedly.
The number of correspondents featured on air during the average evening newscast has been cut by more than a third since the peak in 1985, from 76.7 to 50 in 2002, according to Joe Foote, a professor of journalism at Arizona State University. That is a drop of 35 percent.
And that reduction in staff has meant an increase in reporter workload. In 1985, reporters appearing in evening newscasts did an average of 31.4 stories a year. By 2002, that number had climbed to 40.9, according to Foote. Figures for other network staff (producers, cameramen, etc.) were not available, but reductions among them may be even greater due to technological changes.
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1983 to 2002
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Source: Professor Joe Foote, Arizona State University, unpublished data
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The reductions should be understood in context. Some argue that the networks were bloated during the era of oligarchy, when the three nightly newscasts together shared 75 percent of viewers during the dinner hour. Too many people at the networks, critics said, had too little to do. It is almost certain that some bloat existed in such an environment.
Some of these reductions have also come as a result of new technologies that have increased productivity.
Yet cuts of more than one-third probably go beyond the efficiencies created by technology or trimming the unproductive employees. The casualties of these cuts are not just smaller, relatively unknown correspondents, or the underemployed, but some of the networks' bigger names with the greatest expertise. Often these are people who would be most resistant to being shifted from a foreign bureau or specialized beat to a general assignment, but other times, these are simply people who didn't want to take sizable pay cuts.
Whatever the reason, they reflect not just cutting costs but also a change in the nature of network coverage. Take away these reporters' expertise and some diminishment in quality becomes unavoidable, network veterans argue.
Each of the networks has cut back on its beats as it has cut back on its correspondent staff, pushing more people into general assignment work. Most of the networks no longer have Supreme Court correspondents, for instance, but have instead just one correspondent who covers justice.3 [4] Prior to the 2003 war in Iraq, the networks no longer had separate correspondents at the State Department and the Pentagon.4 [5] Instead, they each had a single national security correspondent. Networks usually had both a science correspondent and a health correspondent. Now, it is more common, as is true at NBC, to have a merged science-health reporter, such as NBC's Robert Bazell.
Some of the effects of these changes are difficult to quantify. Critics, however, suggest that the consequences reach farther than may meet the eye.
Where networks once assigned two or even three reporters to places such as Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department, the job is usually filled by one correspondent and less experienced off-air staffers. On its face, not having duplicate reporters may seem like good sense. Some critics argue that without its bench, network coverage has become thinner. Another consequence, some network veterans say, is that when a major story develops and the networks "go live," the lone correspondent is often stuck for hours in front of the camera, his or her reporting confined to what can be gotten over the cell phone. Moreover, everything that has happened in front of the camera has occurred in the editorial structure of camera crews, producers, editors and researchers who are unseen.
Such consequences may be an unavoidable effect of declining audience, but they affect the product and may, in a vicious cycle, encourage still more viewers to turn away.