Dave Busiek spent 43 years in Iowa radio and TV newsrooms, the last 30 years as news director at KCCI-TV in Des Moines. He writes the Substack newsletter Dave Busiek on Media, where this essay first appeared.

I recently came across a Facebook post that stopped me cold. It felt less like a feel-good story and more like a warning—a glimpse into what the future of local TV news may become if we’re not careful.

The post from August 29 shows a smiling young woman outside Mason City, Iowa, TV station KIMT’s studio in Rochester, Minnesota. Kamie Roesler writes,

“Walking out of work right now feeling accomplished tonight, not that anyone cares, but I will share anyway.”

The next sentence she shared made me, and a lot of other people care.

“This is nothing new, but tonight for our 10 p.m. news we had only two people in the building. My TV station has had major cuts. These two people working tonight: myself and a director. These two people work in different departments. I make the newscasts and sportscasts, she punches the buttons so they appear on air.”

Wait. Two people? In the entire station? To put on a nightly newscast?

That’s not just troubling—it’s downright absurd.

Kamie explained how her evening unfolded:

It was the first Friday night of high school football. Between the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts, she ran out to multiple games, gathered highlights, then rushed back to the station. She edited all the video, wrote the scripts, and built the entire show. She also anchored it, handled the sports segment, and produced every element viewers saw on air.

Facebook comments ranged from “you are a rock star, Kamie” to “you need to find a job at a better station.” She is rightly proud of pulling off a miracle for viewers Friday night, but this isn’t heroism. It’s exploitation. It borders on malpractice by station leadership.

KIMT is the CBS affiliate in the Mason City, Rochester, Austin market—covering northern Iowa and southern Minnesota. It’s a small market, ranked 153^rd out of 210 TV markets. The station has, or at least had, a proud tradition. (It was where anchor Jodi Huisentruit worked before her tragic and still-unsolved disappearance in 1995.)

WHERE’S THE BEEF?

After reading Kamie’s post, I was able to watch the replay of the Friday 10 p.m. newscast on KIMT’s website. Despite Kamie’s best efforts, it was almost completely devoid of any fresh, compelling, local content. The lead story was a package from another station on the Minneapolis school shooting. There was one local package from a reporter who did a one-man-band story from “earlier in the week” at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. (A one-man-band story means the reporter is shooting his video, writing the story, and editing the package—instead of the usual set up of a reporter and photographer working in tandem.)

Aside from that, the newscast featured a lot of still photos, file video and re-written news releases. An aerial still photo of a school delayed by a mold problem, a still photo of a police officer who died, file video of Iowa Senator Joni Ernst perhaps not running again, a news release about weekend holiday traffic read over—what else?—file video of highway traffic.

Kamie also anchored the sports, with highlights from high school games she covered earlier in the evening.

There was a weathercast with a meteorologist named Tom Sater. Best I can tell, he works in Atlanta and probably feeds out custom weathercasts to KIMT and other stations owned by Allen Media Group. That’s the same company that tried to fire ALL local meteorologists earlier this year before backing off in the face of an uproar from viewers.

A DEARTH OF ORIGINAL CONTENT

What’s missing is fresh local video, original content, or any feeling at all that this station has the community covered like a blanket. None of this is Kamie’s fault. She did her best, but one person cannot cover an entire day’s news. It’s ludicrous. Station owners and managers set her up to fail.

What a quality TV news operation should do is have people out on the streets generating original content. Knocking on doors. Asking pesky questions. Shooting compelling video. Doing live shots. Demonstrating that you’re out there busting your butt on behalf of your loyal viewers.

TV news must be more than rewriting news releases and using still photos.

As bereft of content as this newscast was, what would have happened had there been breaking news just before airtime? What was Kamie supposed to do? What if there had been severe weather? Can the meteorologist in Atlanta keep viewers up to date minute by minute on a storm’s progress?

WILL THIS BECOME THE NEW NORMAL?

As much as I’d like to chalk this up to being an unusually skeletal staff in a small market on a Friday night of a holiday weekend, this should never happen. TV news is a 24/7/365 commitment to your viewers. We’re there on holiday weekends. We’re there on Christmas morning. Viewers need to trust that if something happens, we’re all over it.

Kamie finished up her Facebook post with,

“My director is new – and we got it done and nailed it tonight. In a normal world this work would be done by a lot more people. Whatever we did it. Proud of it.”

And we’re proud of you, Kamie. But with the anticipated wave of TV station owner consolidation leading to staff cuts, I fear this just might become the “normal world.”