Stay in Your Lane (Don't)
Check the video recommendation at the end.
For twenty years, the advice was the same. Pick a lane. Get great at it. Stay there.
EVS operator. Director. Camera op. Graphics. Audio. Lighting. Production manager. Whichever one you picked, the path was vertical. Get faster. Get sharper. Become the person nobody can replace at that one thing.
That advice was right for a long time. Two reasons.
The skills took years. You did not learn EVS in a weekend, and you did not learn to direct a live show in a quarter.
The tools were physical. A graphics designer did not run the graphics machine on air. A graphics op did not design the package in After Effects. Different rooms. Different jobs. Different paychecks.
The dual role was rare. The specialist was protected.
That world is ending.
1. What automation already did to the newsroom.
The biggest TV station groups in the United States used to run a full operation in every city they covered. Graphics in the local newsroom. Voiceover talent in the local studio. Promo cutters down the hall. Engineers across town.
Not anymore. They are moving to hubs.
Nexstar, one of the largest US station groups, now runs the graphics for its stations out of a single building in Nashville. Voiceover work for the entire portfolio routes through a centralized service. The local stations still go on the air every night. The people who used to make the local creative work do not.
One hub. Hundreds of broadcasts. A fraction of the people.
Inside the studio, the same compression. One operator running automated playout, graphics templates, robotic camera presets, audio fades, and the teleprompter for a thirty-minute show. The director is software. The TD is software. The audio op is software. The human is the last one left, monitoring the machine that does the work nine humans used to do.
That is where US local TV news already lives. The question is which production room is next.
2. Sports is the next room.
The first wave will not be a Champions League final. The first wave is the games nobody is fighting over.
A college conference match with two cameras and a scorebug. A municipal league semifinal. A second-tier basketball game. Anything where the production calls for one switch, one lower third, and a clock graphic. AI-driven cameras can cover these. AI graphics templates already exist. Cloud switchers like vMix let one person, one laptop, one hotel room, run the entire show.
If your career was built on those productions, you are already losing seats to a stack that costs the rights holder ninety percent less than your crew quote.
The top tier is safe longer. Not safe forever. The same trajectory that took broadcast technicians from 31,580 jobs to 21,080 in six years (BLS, May 2018 to May 2024) is now sitting at the door of every operator who does one thing for a living.
3. The opportunity nobody wants to call an opportunity.
Here is where this gets uncomfortable to say out loud. There is an opportunity here.
Not for everyone. For the operator who picks up a second skill, then a third, then a fourth. For the producer who learns enough graphics to mock up her own format. For the production manager who learns enough data tools to model a three-scenario budget alone. For the camera op who learns the cloud switcher.
The cost of a first draft has collapsed. The skill stack required to make one has not. That gap is where the seats are.
4. What hard to substitute looks like.
A production manager who only does what production managers already do, schedule crews, track budgets, manage call sheets, run the rundowns, will lose her seat to an AI agent that does the same for fifty dollars a month. A production manager who reads a contract before she signs it, models the financial impact of a force majeure clause, and pushes back on a vendor’s payment terms with numbers from her own spreadsheet, will not.
The seats that survive are the ones one step beyond the job description. Finance basics. Contract literacy. Enough legal to know which clause to flag.
A graphics op who only builds graphics will lose her seat to a templating system. A graphics op who can also direct a small show, write a script outline, and operate the cloud playout will not.
The new defense is not depth in one skill. It is range across three or four. The AI tools you need to learn to get there are free or nearly free. The cost is the hour every week you have to put in to learn them.
The old advice was, pick a lane.
The new advice is, pick three lanes and learn how to drive in all of them.
One line I keep coming back to
“The specialist is no longer the safest hire. The skill-stacker is.”
The advice that protected our parents will not protect us.
I want to leave you with one of the best videos I have seen about broadcasting.
Marques Brownlee is one of my favorite YouTubers and content creators. His main channel has 21 million subscribers and it was impressive to see how amazed he was with the NBC Sports set up to cover the NBA Finals.
His latest video is another proof that our world is still a mystery for millions out there.
See you next week.
Oscar S.