KVLY

An Overall Toxic Work Environment

The General Manager and News Director are wholly incompetent and at times downright cruel to newsroom employees. There’s a reason why they haven’t hired a producer in well over a year. They also gave an open white supremacist and COVID conspiracy theorist a platform for well over a decade, hurting the reputation of the newsroom.

Gray Television exists solely to underpay and overwork recent college grads until they get burnt out and leave the industry entirely… and then management wonders why there’s no one left to take on leadership positions in their newsrooms. Benefits are the bare minimum and are being gutted with each passing moment.
Management loves to talk about opportunities within Gray, and how the company wants to keep and build talent, while refusing transfers and LYING to our faces about it. Management expects you to empathize with them about staffing issues and sacrifice more of your time… while firing multiple hardworking people for basically no reason. There are probably some well-run Gray stations, but Valley News Live is an absolute joke.
The bottom line is you will get paid basically nothing to do extremely difficult work, with no guidance from management, all while getting trashed by the community.

Sexual Discrimination, An Overall Toxic Work Environment

General manager is a misogynist and news director is a doormat. Coworkers were generally cool and helpful, but morale is consistently low and management sets everyone up to fail. And worse, there’s no sympathy if you stumble, and no positive or even constructive feedback. The morning shows are an afterthought and that shift is just its own toxic pit of death.

The Gray Television business model is to hire young people fresh out of college, pay them next to nothing, and barely train them. And then when they inevitably get burnt out and move on, blame them for their perceived shortcomings and trash talk them for years to come. Turnover is insane and most of the current newsroom is close to quitting, but at least they got a fancy new set! smh

I'll say that out of all the stations I've worked for this is the only one that had it's sh*t together. It was an absolute power house where I probably learned the most from being at. They had enough edit bays, equipment was fixed in a timely manner, but it was under-staffed like every other station. I will say that it's a good place to start out. It's not the BEST working environment but you'll come out of it a better journalist because of the trials.