Better understanding success and satisfaction of local television news directors
By Chip Mahaney
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is Part Two of a four-part series examining the role, pressures, and professional realities of local television news directors.
“Managing is getting paid for home runs someone else hits.”
– Casey Stengel, baseball manager 1934-1965
“I am probably the only guy who worked for Stengel before and after he was a genius.”
– Warren Spahn, major league pitcher 1942-1965
PART TWO: Looking for further clues and comparisons in a review of relevant research.
Casey Stengel managed some of the best squads ever to play a season (7 World Series championships, three additional American League pennants with the New York Yankees, from 1949-1960), as well as some of the worst (the woeful first four seasons with the expansion New York Mets, 1962-1965).
Did Stengel’s managerial skills magically disappear in 1961? Of course not. Expansion teams like the 1962 Mets are built primarily from end-of-the-bench castoffs from established clubs. Much more goes into the success of a baseball season than the manager’s skill alone. Longtime Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver understood similarly, “People often talk about how many games a manager can win, but what wins games is how the players perform.”
Researchers have sought to understand better the complex connections among the manager and his athletes, the club/organization, the community and fans, and the competitive environment, including rival teams and their players and coaches.
One project evaluated baseball managers’ comings and goings based on two forms of performance feedback – experiential and vicarious. Experiential feedback is what an organization uses to make decisions based on its own outcomes against its own standards. Often that feedback comes down to this: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If the team is winning games on the field and placing well in the standings, and if the fans are happy and buying tickets and merchandise, then everyone gets praise and more substantial rewards for (obviously!) a great strategy and execution.
On the other hand, when the team slumps and falls short of expectations, and when the crowds thin and grow restless in the stands, even a sound strategy executed by an experienced and successful manager will be questioned and perhaps even thrown out. And the manager himself becomes exposed and vulnerable to an unplanned and unwanted job change. It’s a “win-stay, lose-shift” logic.
In a closed-fishbowl environment such as professional baseball, it’s easy for one team to keep tabs on the other teams. A team that struggles – either for a single year or for many – will look across to its competitors to analyze the strategies and people that are winning at that moment. This is called vicarious feedback. Whatever the successful organizations are doing, on the field and in the front office, becomes the hot flavor of the month for other teams aspiring for that success. Their strategies are mimicked. Their people are poached.
Another research question: Is it better to hire an experienced leader or promote (or recruit) someone stepping into the manager role for the very first time? Researchers note that these hiring decisions are based on risk assessment and tolerance because they are critical to the team or organization’s short-term success, and the cost of failure is extraordinary, especially when better results don’t materialize.
There is one key difference between hiring leaders for baseball and for news. Because baseball teams perform and win or lose in full view of the public, there’s an extra layer to the hiring process – fan reaction – that is not a concern for hiring local television news directors.
Other researchers have taken similar angles to measure the impact of baseball managers.
One surveyed baseball data from 1969 to 1987 – 19 seasons – to try to measure the impact of managers on team outcomes (winning) and individual player performance. His primary question is, “What does a firm get when it invests in a high-quality manager?” The findings: Managerial quality had “a positive, usually significant effect on team winning percentage,” and that “major league baseball teams appear to be getting a bargain when they hire better managers.”
Review of relevant research – public administration
When a baseball manager leaves voluntarily or is replaced, there’s a measurable impact on the players and the team assembled in the locker room. And often, given how contracts are written, a manager’s involuntary departure has a significant impact on the club’s financial bottom line as well. Buyouts for a manager’s departure can cost millions of dollars, just so the club can gain the freedom to spend another sum of millions on a contract for the new manager.
In public administration, the dollar figures are usually lower, but not insignificant. The Austin city manager quoted above, who was fired by a vote of the city council, left with a year’s salary and benefits totaling nearly half a million dollars of taxpayer money. There are other impacts too, including the outright cost of recruiting and hiring the next manager, as well as disruption to leadership, strategy, and communications. It makes sense to see that longer tenures with success in key measures lead to a better-functioning local government.
One relevant study identifies four factors that go a long way to determine a local manager’s tenure: the person, the job, the community, and the election system. In other words, there’s more to it than just the manager. But the study found that hiring a manager with longer tenures in their past suggested longer tenures in their next job. Further, a manager with more control or agency over budget and staff are more likely to stay.
Another study identified four city manager career paths: 1) ladder climbers, 2) lateral movers, 3) long servers, and 4) single-city careerists. News directors will identify with one or more of these labels.
Review of relevant research – local television news
There is no contemporary study of local television news directors that compares to what has been researched in public administration. And for nearly 30 years, there was no significant research at all to better understand the role of the news director and their feelings about their job.
Vernon Stone, a professor at several universities, including the Missouri School of Journalism, wrote several studies on the fast-maturing field of television news beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. Stone served as research director for the Radio Television News Directors Association for more than 20 years, each year surveying news directors across the country, compiling hiring and salary statistics to track key industry trends. Bob Papper picked up this work from Stone in the early 2000s. Papper and Syracuse/Newhouse colleagues Keren Henderson and Tim Morabito continue that work today. Their breadth of yearly research, still sponsored by our association (now RTDNA), surveys hundreds of local news directors and tracks several points of data, including 1) how many hours of local news on air each day, 2) staff sizes for large, medium, and small markets, 3) salaries, also broken down by market size (ranked 1-210 by Nielsen), and 4) newsroom profitability. Their 2025 edition included responses to why employees were leaving their newsroom jobs. The most-reported answers included 1) salary, 2) work-life balance, and 3) burnout, but many other responses were submitted. There’s no special breakout for responses from news directors, but experience suggests they leave their jobs for reasons like those of the local television employee pool at large.
For decades, research on local broadcast news was sparse, and local television news directors – their attitudes, interests, concerns, careers, and fears – were apparently not a subject of interest. That changed in the current decade. With most local newspapers collapsing over the past 15 years, local television newsrooms now employ the most journalists in most markets. So, it’s good that more academic research is focusing on the role of the leaders of these newsrooms.
Professors Suzanne Lysak and Keren Henderson’s 2025 research showed how upheavals in the world (such as COVID-19) and in the newsroom (such as industry consolidation) have impacted management roles in broadcast newsrooms. News directors are often caught in the middle, trying to lead content creation guided by their journalistic values and local sensibilities, while maintaining good standing with corporate leaders who now oversee vastly larger groups of stations. For instance, after a years-long series of acquisitions, Nexstar Media owns 200 stations across markets of all sizes in the United States. News directors are now often the department’s HR leader, dealing with employee needs and crises now more than ever. They’re also in charge of creating new content and new programs for all new platforms. Social media has occupied a significant share of a newsroom’s attention for the past 15 years; many stations now support a wide array of platforms far beyond the staples of Facebook and X, including Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and others.
The COVID-era rush to streaming is another primary example. Many stations are now producing hours of programs per week solely for streaming. Staff sizes have not kept pace with the increase in hours of live production and content generation. Almost every newsroom is producing more content with fewer people than in years past.
Burnout has become a focus for researchers in the current decade. The 2023 edition of the RTDNA staff/salary research reported that more than two-thirds of all news directors said they had seen more evidence of staff burnout compared to the past. The researchers provided a number of anecdotal snippets of quotes from respondents on the subject, with themes like “no longer fun”, “flared tempers”, “exhaustion”, “too many job vacancies, and no pipeline for reinforcements”, “more sick days”, and “people quitting even before their contracts were up”.
Chip Mahaney has more than 40 years of experience in television and digital journalism, including decades in newsroom leadership and talent development. He is currently a Media Executive-in-Residence for the Journalism Division at Southern Methodist University, where he teaches and helps build broadcast and sports journalism programs. A former TV news director, Chip has trained and mentored thousands of journalists and has long served the profession through RTDNA leadership and Murrow Awards judging.
COMING IN PART THREE: But what about the news director? What do they think about their jobs?