The Boston Globe
There’s one story on Boston’s TV news stations that won’t seem to go away: an exodus of on-air talent that has been depleting the ranks of local broadcasters in recent years.
Big names including WBZ-TV’s (Channel 4) Jon Keller and WHDH-TV’s (Channel 7) Kim Khazei are just the most recent examples of the accelerating flight of journalists from the airwaves. Across the Boston TV market, staff both in front of and behind the camera have been signing off for the last time.
While staff cuts and retirements are taking a toll, many of the departed staffers say there’s a deeper reason. Cost reductions by station owners, brought on by rapid technological changes and declining audiences, are making it difficult to do the job in a way that makes the long hours and high stress worthwhile.
“The stories felt the same,” former WHDH reporter Sabrina Silva said, describing the frustrations that helped lead to her departure this year. “I would go to one fire and I would cover it, and it would be the same script that I wrote on another fire a week ago.”
TV news has never been for the faint of heart. Stories of fatal crashes, killings, and other traumas often lead newscasts, along with the time-honored sports, weather, and traffic segments. But as newsrooms continue to shrink, many who have recently left the field said their organizations no longer had time for more fulfilling storytelling.
It’s gotten bad enough that journalists aren’t just leaving. They’re swearing off TV news altogether — a remarkable step for people who once considered broadcast media their calling.
Silva connected with TV news as a kid after coming to the United States from Brazil at 10. Between hours of movies and Disney Channel originals, she watched local TV news to help learn English. After college, she took an on-air job in small-town Louisiana and worked her way up to Boston’s much larger market.
This year, she finally decided she’d had enough of the grind and traded news for real estate. Her decision was partly motivated by a need for more time to visit her sick grandmother, but burnout helped reinforce her decision to leave news entirely.
“The issue here was, ‘If it bleeds it leads,’ and I felt as though we were prioritizing breaking news that we didn’t have a lot of information on over stories that we had been working on for a while,” Silva said.
She’s just one of a string of departures in recent years, including Beth Germano and Christina Hager of WBZ and former WFXT-TV (Channel 25) anchors Vanessa Welch and Elizabeth Hopkins. Liam Martin, a former WBZ morning anchor, spoke extensively about the toll the job took on his mental health when he left the station last year.
A survey conducted at the end of 2024 by the Radio Television Digital News Association and the Newhouse School at Syracuse University found that after several years of increases, full-time local TV news employment fell 2.9 percent nationally from a year before. While the authors cautioned that the drop could be inflated due to a decline in responses, they said there was no doubt there was an overall decrease.
That’s a concerning sign for an industry that had been able to keep employment essentially steady for more than a decade.
More than a dozen former anchors, reporters, producers, and videographers across Boston’s commercial TV news market spoke to the Globe for this story. Nearly all of them said they rarely watch the news anymore.
While they loved their time working in the business, many feel that they can get better information elsewhere, such as on social media or on websites. They lamented repetitive coverage of tragic events and the lack of in-depth storytelling.
Jackie Bruno, a former NBC10 Boston anchor and reporter who now runs a PR agency, said she only watches local news when her clients are on. Otherwise, she doesn’t tune in.
“I end up throwing things at the TV, going, ‘Oh my god. Why did they do that?’” she said.
While audiences will still see anchors reading from teleprompters and reporters out on the scene, former journalists say many of the newsrooms are a lot emptier, as stations have been slow to replace departing workers or not fill their roles at all.
Boston 25 (WFXT) had roughly seven to nine reporters on the day shift when Jim Morelli joined the staff in 2015, he said in an interview. By the time he left earlier this year, it was down to two or three.
“Towards the end, we would often say in the field that if we were the only ones at a story, it must be because we’re missing a story somewhere else,” said Morelli, who is still searching for his next job. “You can’t do much when you’ve got two reporters or three, even, in a city the size of Boston.”
Morelli said the changes came after private equity giant Apollo Global Management bought Cox Media Group in 2019, the parent company of Boston 25. Under the firm’s ownership, the station has laid off staff, cut anchors’ salaries, and slowly replaced departing employees.
With fewer people watching local news, advertising has brought in less money, leading to job cuts but also more hours of local news. It’s often cheaper to produce local programming than to pay for national content.
“For profit seems to be more important than for content,” said Bob Lobel, the former WBZ sportscaster who was a local legend during the industry’s golden age, in an interview.
As more veteran journalists leave, stations are also hiring younger employees who often earn lower salaries. While former journalists stressed it’s not necessarily a bad thing to give young staff a big break, the decisions can mean bitter tradeoffs.
“There was no respect given to veteran reporters like myself,” said David Robichaud, a WBZ reporter who left in 2018 and now teaches at Bridgewater State University. “They didn’t care that you’d probably been to every police station in Massachusetts and knew the difference between Gloucester and Scituate, and knew how to pronounce the names of those towns.”
Critical behind-the-scenes staff such as special projects producers at NBC10 and photographers at WBZ, a CBS local station, have also been laid off or taken buyouts.
A CBS Boston spokesperson said local news is “experiencing a transformative moment” and that its “commitment to quality journalism and to the people, which includes veteran journalists who deliver it, remains unwavering.”
Generally, TV salaries continue to increase. The RTDNA/Newhouse survey found that salaries rose by 3.2 percent from a year ago, just outpacing inflation at 2.9 percent.
But pay varies widely by market, the report showed. The median salary for a reporter in a top 25 market — which includes Boston — was $97,000 this year, compared with $37,000 for the smallest markets. And the maximum salaries for anchors, news reporters, and news producers have all dropped since 2023.
Across the market, those who have stuck with the industry are struggling to keep up as they juggle more duties than ever.
Melissa Pagano, a former producer at WBZ who now works in public relations, left the business in 2022 after years of working a grueling shift; she would start at 11 p.m. and finish at 7 a.m. While she left largely because she wanted better hours as she and her husband planned to start a family, changes in the business also influenced her decision.
For a time, Pagano said the show had dedicated producers for the 4:30 a.m., 5 a.m., and 6 a.m. slots. But toward the end of her tenure, there were only two morning producers, meaning that they were often building shows while on the air.
“As newsrooms start shrinking, that luxury kind of goes out the window a little bit, and you kind of go into survival mode,” she said.
One exception to the departures, at least with on-air talent, is market leader WCVB-TV (Channel 5). President and general manager Andrew Vrees told the Globe that the station has not cut staff and in some cases, “created new positions to grow our digital footprint” when employees retire.
That includes a new digital content producer who has helped grow the station’s audience across social media. Many in the industry are holding out hope that this kind of approach can help TV news stations leverage their video capabilities to reach new audiences hand find a way to monetize that growth.
“I still believe that TV stations are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this changing landscape, but they have to take that step and really be bold about it,” said Mike Beaudet, a WCVB investigative reporter and Northeastern University journalism professor who leads the school’s Reinventing Local TV News Project.
