Here’s the Roundup for the Week Ending November 22

Happy Friday to all who celebrate! In this week’s edition of stories we didn’t get to for one reason or another, we get a little more info on the Tegna layoffs and how our friend AI may start to impact our professional lives. We also see a few heavyweights hang up their lav mics in favor of retirement.

Let’s make the dough:

The Changing Industry:

• Tegna lays off local station marketers in favor of centralized marketing: Anne Bentley, Tegna’s chief communications officer: “The [marketing] team will oversee key areas including the growth of our stations and audience, digital marketing, consumer insights, community engagement, commercial production and strategic initiatives like sponsorships and sports.” Click here for more.

• Our good friend over at FTVLive had this to add: Like the rest of the Tegna stations, the entire marketing team was cut at KXTV in Sacramento. But the cuts did not end there at the NorCal station. Also whacked were a Meteorologist, special projects Photographer and all the Directors at the station.

• And over on Reddit, one local station employee talked about what’s happening. We asked them about it, but haven’t heard any details:

For context I work production in local news. Recently there’s been developments in AI driven systems that can do 100% of the production side of things which is, direct, audio operate, and graphic operate -all of those jobs are all now gone in one swoop. This has apparently been developed by the company Q ai.

For the last decade I’ve worked in local news and have garnered skills I thought I would be able to take with me until my retirement, now at almost 30 years old, all of those job opportunities for me are gone in an instant. The only person that’s keeping their job is my manager, who will overlook the system and do maintenance if needed. That’s 20 jobs lost and 0 gained for our station.

We were informed we are going to be the first station to implement this under our company. This means that as of now our entire production staff in our news station is being let go. Once the system is implemented and running smoothly then this system is going to be implemented nationwide (effectively eliminating tens of thousands of jobs.) There are going to be 0 new jobs built off of this AI platform.

There are people I work with in their 50’s, single, no college education, no family, and no other place to land a job once this kicks in. I have no idea what’s going to happen to them. This is it guys. This is what our future with AI looks like. This isn’t creating any new jobs this is knocking out entire industry level jobs without replacing them.

Click here to see the post