No, it’s not your imagination. TV news anchors are being let go, another casualty in the changing economics of news. Yes, it’s been seen in Houston too. From the NY Times:
In Houston, the 26-year veteran Carolyn Campbell was dismissed from KHOU.
Why?
Local TV, although it lacks the glamour of the network nightly news or
the prestige of print newspapers, remains the most popular single
source of news in the United States. Slightly more than half of the
population watches local news regularly, according to the Pew Research
Center for People and the Press, while only 34 percent read a newspaper
each day and 29 percent watch a network evening newscast.But the ratings for the broadcasts have gradually eroded over the
years. The typical late newscast now reaches 12 percent of viewers
watching TV in a given market, down from 21 percent 10 years ago.
Putting that into numbers:
After surveying 300 newsrooms last summer, Mr. Papper projected that about 360 local TV news jobs had been lost this year. (That represents only a small fraction of the thousands of journalists laid off by newspapers, though TV news operates with a much smaller base of employees.)
But that’s the way it started at the newspapers. First it was one or five percent reduction. Then it became an annual bloodletting. Now it’s rare to have the same reporter there from year to year.
