Survey: TV News Salaries Gain Ground, Not Radio

The latest RTDNA/Hofstra University Annual Survey found that local television news salaries rose by 1.9% in 2014. That's up by 0.3 from a year ago, and with inflation an extremely low 1.6%, that means that TV news salaries gained slightly in purchasing power last year. The spread of 0.3 this year at least beats the 0.1 difference a year ago.

However, radio salaries dropped 4.1% from last year... after barely rising the year before. Factor in inflation, and radio salaries really lost ground in the last year.

Radio news salaries show an overall decline of 4.1% from a year ago -- which is likely more a reflection of which stations fill out the salary data from one year to the next than an actual drop in salaries. Next year, we'll find out whether the aberration was this year or last year.

News directors, news producers and news anchors went down. News reporters and web producer/editors went up. Enough sports anchors and reporters showed up in the survey this year to report the results; that wasn't the case a year ago.

Usually, RTDNA says there's some pattern to the salaries but not this year. There are ups and downs for every position in every market size. The only fairly consistent pattern in that the larger the newsroom, generally, the larger the salary. That was not the case for the number of stations in a market, station configuration or geography.   Major markets are those with 1 million or more listeners. Large markets are those from 250,000 to 1 million; medium markets are from 50,000 to 250,000; and small markets have fewer than 50,000 listeners.

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