GM bankruptcy could help solo-journalists?

There have been several reports citing the risks to TV stations from the bankruptcy of General Motors.

As most of us who work in TV know, car advertisements make up a large part of the revenue of stations. For local network affiliates, cutbacks have been fairly severe in recent months, mainly due to big reductions in the advertising budgets of local car dealerships.

Well, it seems the networks and station groups are set to suffer too. According to this report in Broadcasting and Cable, several ad agencies that buy airtime on behalf of GM are among the top twenty creditors cited in the bankruptcy court filing.

While cutbacks in newsroom staffing at the networks and affiliates is not a good thing for the industry as a whole, this passage from the Project for Excellent in Journalism's report on the State of the News Media in 2008 offers an interesting perspective:

"...while the evidence suggests that overall staffing continued to drop [in 2008], the three networks appear to be responding to the long-standing decline in foreign bureaus by re-staffing with one-person bureaus, bringing overseas bureau numbers back up to the mid-teens."

The full report can be seen here

This, of course, refers to foreign bureaus. But it does seem to suggest that TV executives are using the one-person bureau model as a solution to staffing issues in tough economic times. Deep cuts in overseas coverage has been evident over many years, amazingly even since September 11th 2001. But it appears that the leaner, meaner times we live in has given the solo-journalist model a boost, and is even helping to sow the seeds of growth in bureau openings.

Maybe the bankruptcy of General Motors will work in favor of the one-man-band. That may be a stretch, but when you consider that TV companies are owed tens of millions of dollars by GM via its ad agencies, it may well result in the need to economize more in the nation's newsrooms. Hopefully those who make the decisions will elect to reduce costs by changing the way their organizations work, rather than just cutting.