WTEN | WXXA

An Overall Toxic Work Environment

News Director Ryan Mott is very manic. Cool and friendly one minute, grumpy and condescending the next. His toxicity is annoying but not unbearable. Mott is overly obsessed with having hard news lead stories despite Albany being a medium to low activity activity news market. The anchors get more freedom than reporters to do feature stories that would fill the hard news void.

I recommend starting here for one contract then getting out for something better with more money.

***PROS***
GOOD STARTER STATION:
-NEWS 10 ABC/FOX 23 is a great station to start your career, but not to stay.
-You get nearly free rein to find and tell stories if the news director likes them.

PAIRED WITH A PHOTOG OFTEN
-Minimal MMJing.
-Weekday Morning & Evening gets a photog everyday.
-Weekend Morning gets a photog sometimes.
-Weekend Evening always MMJs unless there's breaking news.
-Weekday dayside gets photogs 95% of the time if the ratio of reporters to photogs is good.
-With a bad ratio, weekday dayside reporters get photogs about 70% of the time.

DECENT WORK LOAD:
-Reporters are only assigned ONE STORY per day and hardly have to do extra work like sending vo/sots, stand up teases, web videos etc. You are typically asked to do your single story then write and post your web article.
-No going live for live sake: Reporters do "look lives" most of the time, only going live when the story warrants it.
-Reporters are not asked to add a second angle or switch up their package for different shows. Your packages are at 4pm, then typically repeats in all shows.

WELCOMING ENVIRONMENT:
-Reporters and staff help each other.
- Most anchors are humble and lack ego.

ACCEPTS NEW GRADS: You can get a job right out of college at this Market #62 (rank fluctuates) station, expect dirty pay ($17-$20/hr), ($19-$24/hr) for reporter/weekend anchor role.

***CONS***
LOW PAY:
- starting at $16/hr for photogs, $17/hr for reporters.
-Lowest paying station in the market despite having the highest ratings.
-extremely high turnover in all departments because of pay

CHEAP
-Only station in the market where reporters don't have work phones.
- No hair or make up incentives.
- Most news cars even lack umbrellas for talent to use during rainy live shots.
-Cheap, outdated, and sometimes broken camera gear and SD cards.

NO UNION:
-WTEN is the ONLY non-unionized station in the market. You have no protection from management.
-Several illegal union busting attempts were made at WTEN.

DISORGANIZED ASSIGNMENT DESK:
-constantly misses court dates and sends photogs off to crappy vo/sot stories when they could be paired with a reporter.

PLAYING FAVORITES:
-The competition WNYT & WRGB offer fill in anchoring opportunities to nearly all their talent.
-WTEN's News Director Ryan Mott would rather one anchor go solo for 3 hours straight than ask one of the reporters to substitute.
- Of the very few reporters Ryan does let anchor, he seems to prefer women.
-Very few male reporters are hired (outside of sports and weather). The current station's line up is mostly white women.

DOESN'T CARE ABOUT OR HIGHLIGHT REPORTERS:
-Reporters are treated interchangeably while anchors are spotlighted.
-The competition WNYT is more adept and highlighting reporters.

IGNORING PROBLEMATIC EMPLOYEES:
- Mostly good people work here but management ignores the few bad apples (namely some producers and photographers) because they need cheap labor.

HIGH TURNOVER:
-most reporters and producers stick around for one contract, then leave for bigger opportunities or outright leave the news business.

DISORGANIZED MORNING SHIFT
The morning EP Jackie is never present in the morning leading to communication breakdowns between the morning reporter and the myriad of producers.