As Noncompete Clauses Get Tighter, Newsrooms Feel the Grip

Noncompete clauses have been a regular condition for employees at local television news stations for decades, keeping both on and off-air employees from moving to another station in the same market for up to a year after their contract ends.

The Federal Trade Commission is moving to severely curb noncompete clauses, but trade associations are fighting the change, saying that the news outlets spend considerable time training and marketing their journalists. One study found that 90% of news anchors, 78% of TV reporters and 87% of weathercasters are bound by non-competes, reports The NYTimes.

The restrictions have been a condition of the job for reporters, anchors, sportscasters and meteorologists for decades. More recently, they’ve spread to off-air roles like producers and editors — positions that often pay just barely above the poverty line — and they keep employees from moving to other stations in the same market for up to a year after their contract ends.

For that reason, there’s probably no industry that could change as much as a result of the Federal Trade Commission’s effort to severely limit noncompete clauses — if the proposed rule is not derailed before being finalized. Business trade associations are lobbying fiercely against it.

“The vast majority of people who work in this country, if they find themselves in a bad situation and they don’t like it, they have options to leave, and they don’t have to move,” said Rick Carr, an agent who represents broadcast workers. “And TV doesn’t allow that.”

Noncompete clauses have become standard in many workplaces and cover about 18 percent of the U.S. labor force, according to research by economists at the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan.

In broadcasting, though, noncompetes are ubiquitous. According to a survey of TV news directors by Bob Papper, an adjunct professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, about 90 percent of news anchors, 78 percent of reporters and 87 percent of weathercasters were bound by noncompetes in 2022. Those numbers have been fairly stable for decades.

The National Association of Broadcasters — which signed on to a multiindustry letter opposing the federal government’s proposed ban — says that because stations promote their reporters and anchors to develop their local brand recognition, they should be able to prevent them from "crossing the street."