kidding me?

here is part of an article written by a newspaper reporter in philly...he's talking about the difference between newspaper and tv reporters. some of this might be true (like stations wanting at least decent-looking people on the air...it's TV, a visual medium, i dont think there's a crime in that...as long as the person is actually good and credible)

the part i highlighted in red, drives me crazy. a $700,000 salary?! yeah, maybe if your a veteran anchor in a top three market....that is NOT the norm. another side note, if people get intotv news because they want to be celebrities, they will be sadly disappointed...unless they somehow think it's cool to get recognized once in a while at the drug store! you have to love reporting and telling stories to like this job...doing it just because you want to be on tv is not the right reason.

here's the article:



A newspaper is a news medium, with a little entertainment thrown in, while TV is essentially an entertainment medium with a little news thrown in, with the exception, of course, of the very young all-news cable TV networks.

So TV news, by its nature, has to be entertaining as well as newsy. And I think that, due to that, TV journalists have to be entertaining, too.

I don't mean that they have to be able to juggle or fold balloons or tap dance. I mean they have to be physically attractive and personable and have nice speaking voices.

I don't know exactly when TV news people all of a sudden became beautiful.

I grew up watching Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC and Walter Cronkite on CBS.
Walter Cronkite wasn't exactly a handsome man. He definitely wasn't beautiful or “foxy” like Alycia Lane. But Cronkite was regarded as the most trusted man in America. He was like your uncle or grandfather. When he reported the news, people believed him.

And that's not to imply that you can't trust the news reported by someone with an attractive face.

It's just that it seems that TV news people double as journalists and celebrities. They're paid handsomely (it has been reported that Alycia Lane earns about $700,000 a year), they look good, they get good haircuts and nice wardrobes. They're recognizable.
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They're celebrities — being on TV automatically confers a kind of celebrity status — and probably some of them expect to be treated as celebrities.

Maybe it's unavoidable.

They come into people's living rooms to deliver the news. Their faces are up there on that 45-inch flat screen, so it kind of makes sense that they'd want to put faces up there that were easy to look at. Nobody wants to look at ugly people reading the news when they're eating dinner.
It's bad for ratings.And TV news shows, like TV entertainment shows, are all about ratings.

Print journalists, on the other hand, labor in almost obscurity. They put their names at the top of their stories, but few readers remember who they are.

Print columnists are perhaps a little more recognizable if only because their photograph usually accompanies their work.