Today's salaries are a blast from the past

Grape,

It's obvious that the primo salaries of the 1980s have gone by the wayside.
But by how much?

Let's say a reporter/anchor was pulling down $100,000 a year during the apex of broadcast salaries.(I'm sure it depends on the market and a zillion other variables) But, if you had to make an estimate, what would that same reporter/anchor make in today's news salary market??

Well, funny you should bring this up, as I was recently talking to a reporter who was making the same salary I made as a reporter in 1986. Problem is, things cost a lot more today.

Let's look at my expenses back then on that 20k salary. (Oh, you'll love this... we had a choice of overtime or comp time! You could trade 5 1/2 hours of OT for a day off!)

Rent: $360 (and it was a really nice apartment)
Gas: About $1.25 per gallon
Plane ticket home: Always less than $200
Lunch in a restaurant: Never more than five bucks
Dinner for two in a nice restaurant: $20-30
New car: I bought a brand new Mazda RX-7 two-seater sports car for $11,000. You could easily find something more practical for 7-8K.
Student loans: None. Paid for college working summers.
Expenses that didn't exist: Cell phones, Internet access
Health insurance: $11 per month, $5 co-pay (really good insurance)
Phone bill: Less than $10
Can of soda or candy bar from the vending machine: 25 cents

Now, flash forward to 2010 and you see the problems young people have making ends meet.

As for those big salaries, yes, we had six-figure anchors working in small and medium markets. And yes, those days are long gone. I would guess that those same anchor positions today would pay about half of what they did back then.

The reasons? Cable and satellite TV fragmented the pie, the Internet killed the golden goose, too much supply and not enough demand in the personnel department, loss of network compensation (stations received whopping checks from the networks to run prime time programming.) There are plenty of little things, but those are the major ones.

That supply and demand thing is the big reason stations don't have to pay big salaries anymore. If you won't take that 20k job, there are dozens of eager kids right out of college who will be happy to accept it.

Will it change? Who knows? Some new invention we haven't even considered might create a huge revenue stream for stations. Then again, in twenty years your avatar may be appearing in viewers' living rooms to deliver the news.