Local News Sheds 1.5% Of Jobs In 2009

About 400 local TV newspeople lost their jobs in 2009, about 1.5 percent of the workforce, according to a new survey from the Radio-Television Digital News Association reported.

This is down from 2008 when about 1200 local newspeople were axed, and 60 percent of news directors polled in the latest survey don’t plan to make any more cuts.

And despite layoffs, the survey found that news time hit a record high in 2009, 5 hours a day on weekdays up from 4.7 hours the year before.

770 stations were doing their own news at the beginning of 2009, and 205 more stations were sharing that programming. By the end of the year, eight stations had dropped their original news programming but 19 more had begun sharing programming from another station.

Broadcast junkies: mediabistro.com editorial director Chris Ariens is covering the NAB-RTNDA conference for TVNewser; check out the rest of his coverage here.

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