My Scripps Experience

Needless to say, FTVLive has been hearing from a current and former Scripps employees as the company changes to their new “news initiative.”

One person that worked at Scripps sent along this email to share.

“I was hired at WSYM and they rolled out this new way of doing newscasts where they wanted to focus on MMJ's "owning" beat areas across the DMA. They were going to be anchorless. They were going to brag about having the most MMJ's bringing the audience the best in-depth reporting that will actually make an impact in their communities. I was hired in with the understanding that things wouldn't be like a traditional local TV broadcast. We would have extra time to put together our packages and it would be placed into a "wheel." That lasted all but two weeks. The original crew felt lied to from the beginning. 

The entire rollout was botched from the start. It took too long to get the small newsroom up and running as we continued to grow our staff. Then the complaints started coming in. The public hated the fact we didn't have anchors. Several months in our ND caved and started having a rotation of MMJ's host the newscasts, first in front of a terrible green screen and then they decided to build an actual studio. Once we built the studio it looked much better but the problem was they were asking us to also be anchors too. They thought they could get away with it because our newscasts aren't live. The newscasts never really looked the best because of that. There were no logical transitions, it didn't seem natural. We would just randomly go to commercial break or the newscast would abruptly end. 

We outsourced our weather to our sister station WXMI in Grand Rapids from day 1. They can't stand us. Can't say I blame them. It took months for us to decide to hire our own meteorologist but because we don't have the set up for that he is also based out of our sister station but at least we had a forecast that looked like what you would normally see. After a while they decided to make him cut weather hits (and host two shows) for all of our newscasts. Since I'm no longer there and watch rarely, I can't fully confirm if that ever came to fruition. 

For a moment it felt like we were finding our groove. The complaints stopped. The newsroom had grown. We had solid MMJ's. We won awards. Then the GM and ND picked a group of MMJ's they wanted to extend a second contract to. After they got most of us to sign an extension the ND abruptly took the same position elsewhere and the "executive producer" but was really the Assistant ND quit and went back to print journalism. During this whole time producers would quit because they would either get burned out or move on to different stations. We never had continuity. That includes journalists too. Several of them broke their first contracts or moved on to another market.

Oh and in our second contracts those of foolishly signed had a gigantic buyout clause where Scripps would come after 40 percent of our annual base pay if we broke it within a year of re-signing and then subsequently go down the closer you were to the end of the respective contracts. They were trying to trap us and we FELL FOR IT! My buyout in market #114 was $20,000. 20 grand! are you joking? 

But it didn't work. MMJ's still left because we were all one god awful day away from just saying fuck it we're done with the bullshit. Two went to bigger markets albeit one of them didn't sign the dreaded second contract. Two left the business entirely. One flat out quit because it was too hard on her mental health. 

This is all because...

Content...omg there was never enough content for them. We needed to turn pkg's, "beat hits" but really were just extra VO's or VOSOT's and find an additional 2 articles that would be web only every week and anchor from the field which was a total joke. Let's stand in front of a building for no good reason and do about 5 minutes worth of reads on our own! Doing the most they can squeeze out of your soul with less resources to the absolute extreme. We had a single photog position that we could never keep filled. Then the last person to be a photog they decided to eliminate that position and moved him to MMJ lol.  

They gave three MMJ's permanent anchor roles. But they also had to turn pkg's. Explain how they thought that was possible. And then they went back on that after about a year and got rid of the branded shows but still kept the time slots on air.  

I feel bad for the ND and Assistant ND that ended up replacing the original people in those roles. The second assistant ND who replaced the first one was there for maybe a year before taking a lateral move to another market outside of Scripps. They uprooted their lives to come here under the assumption we were a growing but a successful well oiled machine. They walked into a ticking time bomb. It just goes with the theme of their entire operation since the switch: deception. 

Most of the MMJ's still there are newer. New hires don't even really have a journalism or tv background. The content they put out is mostly fluff. The rest is from our other sister station WXYZ or from national. 

Just a total clusterfuck through and through. People hired in important positions that probably shouldn't have been where they were. I keep trying to think of a good metaphor of what Fox 47 was like under Scripps. It was like someone's idea of what a newscast should look like in the future but without putting in any of the work to actually make it happen properly. Pull the plug already and put the operation and the rest of the employees out of their misery! The sales department seems to love it though or they did until the general sales manager position was eliminated. 

I was only there for just a smidge over two years but it felt like 22 with the amount of changes, stress and chaos.”