Run!
The loudest advice in our business right now is wrong.
The most popular career advice in our industry right now is “Run.”
I have been reading it everywhere. Industry reports. Email threads. Forums. The comment section under every post about broadcasting, AV, concert production, live events.
When someone asks, “should I get into this business?”, the loudest voice in the room is a veteran telling them no.
The pay is bad. The schedule eats your life. AI is taking the jobs. The big companies are firing. The middle is disappearing. Run.
This week I read a thread on 4Wall’s blog, where the production community was asked one question: what advice would you give someone breaking into live events? They got 771 comments. 28 of them, give or take, were variations of one word.
Don’t.
And then, almost every single one of those same people, in the same comment or the one right after, admitted they could not imagine doing anything else.
One commenter opened with “RUN!!!!!” in capital letters. Then came a whole paragraph. A 35-year career. A production company built from nothing. Projects to be proud of. One regret: not enough time with family.
That is the shape of the whole genre. The veteran tells you to run. The veteran did not run. The veteran is not running.
1. I am not telling you to run.
I have read enough of these reports to know things are changing. Some roles are in extinction. Some markets are harder than others. Some companies that used to be a safe play are not the safe play anymore. The automation conversation I will dig into in next week’s edition is the wave coming for everyone whose job is one thing for a living.
All of that is real.
What is also real, and what almost nobody is saying loud enough: millions of people around the world still put food on the table because of this industry. Live sports. Live events. Daily news in dozens of languages. Streaming sports broadcasts. Branded content, YouTube channels. New platforms with new formats that did not exist two years ago.
The pie is not shrinking. It is being recut.
The veterans telling kids to run are not lying. They are looking at the role they had ten or twenty years ago and noticing it does not exist in the same form anymore. That is a real grief. But the role they would build now if they were starting fresh, that role might be the most interesting one in a long time.
Look at what is happening to late-night television. The pundits have been writing its obituary for years. In the USA, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert signed off this past Thursday after eleven years at the Ed Sullivan Theater. In one of his final episodes, Colbert reunited with his fellow late-night hosts and asked Jimmy Kimmel the question that sounds a lot like the one being asked of our industry: make a case for late-night. Why should it continue to exist?
Kimmel’s answer:
I look at the figures, and the fact of the matter is more people are watching late-night television now. We have a lot of shows. People watch it on YouTube now. People have a lot of different options, and yet they keep coming to us.
Jimmy Kimmel, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
That is the whole argument in four sentences. The format people are mourning is not the audience. The audience moved. The audience is bigger than it has ever been. The seats moved with them.
2. Who should actually run.
I want to be honest, because telling everyone to come in is also a lie.
If you came into this expecting a 9 to 5, you should run. You will be unhappy.
If you came in because you wanted fame or quick money, you should run. There are faster industries with better odds.
If your body cannot take the loads, the hours, the time zones, listen to your body. There is no medal for breaking yourself for a show.
If your relationships at home are not built for this lifestyle, no amount of professional success will offset what you lose. Build the relationships first.
But if none of that disqualifies you, and you still find yourself reading a newsletter like this one on a Saturday morning trying to figure out where you fit, you are probably one of us.
3. What I would tell a 22-year-old today.
Do not apprentice yourself to the role that is disappearing. Apprentice yourself to the craft that is durable.
The craft is: solving live problems under time pressure. Reading rooms. Reading rigs. Hearing when something is about to break before it breaks. Being the calm one when the feed drops.
The role can be live sports today and a live podcast network tomorrow and something we do not have a name for in 2030. The craft travels.
Pick a corner of this industry that is growing, not the corner you grew up admiring. Live sports is still there. Live events are back. Content creation has built a parallel production economy from almost nothing in ten years. New platforms with new formats need people who know how to build the unrepeatable moment.
The good corners are obvious if you look at where the money and the attention are moving. The hard part is letting go of the corner that already shaped your identity.
One line I keep coming back to
The veteran tells you to run. The veteran did not run even that her/his industry changed from tapes to files and from SD to HD. The veteran is not running.
The industry is changing. It is not dying. The veterans who are honest with themselves will tell you the truth in their second sentence, after the first one made the joke.
One question for you this week: What would you do if your kids come to you right now telling you that they want to work in the same industry you have been years?
See you next week.
Oscar S.
Great read. The key points? If you want a 9 - 5 job, find another industry. Want the same career from start to finish? Heck, I don't know if that exist anywhere.
Even medicine, dentistry and accounting have changed.
In production we went from analog to digital (thank goodness), from film to tape to disk (although reference to filming and tape still exist), and since the 90s automation has crept into our world.
Since M&A companies entered the industry, it was all about thr bottom line, accelerating staffing cuts.
What I tell my 20 something nephew - be on point for every event, regardless of task. Follow-up with thank you. Always network. Never stop learning.