A couple of posts that I saw recently has me thinking about the industry that captured my imagination as a child, worked tirelessly through school to be a part of, and then experienced the highs and lows of it for nearly 20 years before doing what so many others do--bow out.

Why does burnout come hand-in-hand with this industry? Sure, the work is demanding--tight deadlines, a sense that the job is never done because there's always another event to cover, another newscast to fill with content, etc. There are also factors, working in sports for most of my career, that I didn't have to deal with as much as others. In news, it takes a toll on you mentally to cover stories that are devastating to people, and more recently, journalists in the field have had to deal with hostility after being broadly painted as the enemy in some political circles.

(Quick sidebar on that: your local television news crews are not the same "media" that you see nightly on the cable "news" networks. The people working in your town are journalists, while what you see in prime-time is purely entertainment put on by "personalities.")

The first piece I read was written by a friend and former colleague of mine, Tim Millard. He details the mental toll that working in local TV news took on him based on long-standing ways that TV stations do things: squeezing more and more out of staff without adding to the head count and for lower pay compared to the average job a college graduate could get around town. Put it this way: if wages at my first TV job were being raised to $15 per hour like they are in many other industries now, it would have been a substantial raise!

The second article was more wide-reaching and talked about churn and staffing issues in newsrooms, which are nothing new, but with us being in the middle of the Great Resignation, reports are that it's coming to a head. It's no longer easy to replace talent. I think everyone who worked in broadcasting was told this a time or two: "I can get someone to replace you tomorrow for less than I'm paying you." While this may have been true, the demand no longer outweighs the supply, and it's hurting newsrooms.

This staffing crisis comes at a time when, in my opinion, local TV news needs to reinvent itself. Going back to the title of this article, who is waiting until 11 p.m. to get their news? Prior to a certain age, I'm not sure who even knows when or where they can see local news.

My kids are 11 and 10. They consume media mostly through phones. When they watch TV, it's a show on a streaming service; rarely is it live TV. Unlike my generation at that age, they have no concept of channels, networks, or times that first-run shows are on. When we had the YouTube TV streaming service, the shows that they liked to watch just showed up on the home page. They didn't have to flip channels or scroll through a guide for them. The quest to reach younger viewers is nothing new for TV news, but with the method of reaching them potentially becoming antiquated, major overhauls in delivery of the product will be required. From what I've seen, some stations are aware of this coming reckoning, whereas others are not.

In the meantime, how can the local TV industry retain staff like myself and the dozens of other people in my network who switched careers?

Besides offering more competitive pay--most stations now are owned by media conglomerates and can afford an across-the-board bump in wages--what it comes down to is respecting people's time and lives.

There are some colleagues I worked with for years who didn't take a lunch break. Ever. They weren't told that they could not, but they literally had so much work to do that they could not afford to take a break if they wanted to go home on time (and most of the time, they didn't even do that).

TV stations also never operated at a surplus even in the best of times, so if someone went on vacation, that meant rearranging your life in order to cover their shifts. If someone quit, you hoped that someone else didn't leave, because then that meant a six-day workweek for the foreseeable future.

In my TV life, there was one month where I had three days off. I also remember some weeks in my news days where I did what I called, "the tour of shifts." In a five-day work week, I had start times of 3 a.m., 9 a.m., and 3 p.m. Even something as simple as someone calling out sick could cause chaos. One time, I made my somewhat long commute and showed up at 9 a.m. as scheduled, just to be told that someone on the evening shift called out sick and that I needed to come back at 3 p.m. Ummm... what?

When you're in your 20s and single, these aren't that big of a deal, but when you have a family and would like to do things with them, this above-and-beyond devotion to your job at all costs is difficult. In most cases, that's around the stage of life where people trade it all in for a 9-to-5-type job that pays more with weekends and holidays off.

What about overtime, you may ask? That seems like fair compensation for all of the extra hassle, but for nearly all on-air employees and many producers and even assignment editors, that's not in the cards. Most of those positions (if not all, at some stations) are salaried, meaning they're staying late and picking up extra shifts for free.

The best aspect of my time in the local TV business was the people. Many of my close friends are people I met through work. One day soon, I plan to write about some of these people and some of the wonderful experiences I had through this profession. It's my wish that these employees are treated better so they're not left looking for the escape hatch.

Obviously, some managers are better at understanding the basic concept of respecting employees' time better than others, and my experiences were mostly positive. I know wonderful TV executives who I would love to work for--or would enjoy to work with again. But regardless of where I worked and who I worked for, you would probably hear similar stories from nearly every newsroom in the country. The problem is systemic and will require a concerted effort from within the industry to make it a more work-friendly environment.

Only then will it be equipped to handle the necessary changes that need to be made to capture the attention of future generations of viewers and journalists.