Lady Business: Power outages, NY1, and aging networks

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the seventy-fifth issue, published July 18, 2019. 
 

Losing Power

(Source.)
 

I wound up with the best possible blackout experience Saturday night, when a sizable (if not entirely beloved) chunk of Manhattan went dark for a few hours. I got the horror-movie-adjacent experience, the one that makes a good story but leaves little trauma: I was just out of a basement swimming pool, three stories under daylight, and still buried in the adjacent locker room when, suddenly, I was plunged into total darkness.
 
(It was fine. Emergency lighting and iPhone flashlights eventually saved the day, and I was very grateful not to be in an elevator or subway car at the time. But it was spooky in the moment!)

Then I walked home to find that my luck had held, and my apartment was just outside the Dark Zone. Which means I got to charge my phone and enjoy my ceiling fans while I watched beloved local news channel NY1, for whom a five-hour city blackout was Election Night/Superstorm Sandy-level Big News, a commercial-break-banning marathon of reports from all hands on deck.

Well, some hands on deck. I only watched the channel for about an hour, and I was doing other things at the time, but I couldn’t help but notice: Every woman on air that evening seemed really young. Like, under-30 young. Whereas most of the men on the air that evening looked over 40, at least.

This is totally anecdotal! I don’t watch NY1 all that regularly, and it was indeed a summer Saturday night -- perhaps all the more senior women were in the Hamptons! Normally I’d also say something about how NY1 employs several very accomplished, experienced, senior on-air anchors and reporters, women like Roma Torre and Kristen Shaughnessy and Vivian Lee, women I’ve been watching on that channel for the decade-plus I’ve been living in Manhattan. Except that all of those women are suing NY1 for allegedly pushing them off the air:
 

Five anchorwomen at NY1, one of the country’s most prominent local news channels, sued the network [in June] over age and gender discrimination, alleging a systematic effort by managers to force them off the air in favor of younger, less experienced hosts.
 
… The plaintiffs range in age from 40 to 61 and include Roma Torre, one of the channel’s longest-serving anchors. “We feel we are being railroaded out of the place,” Ms. Torre said in an interview. “Men age on TV with a sense of gravitas, and we as women have an expiration date.”

 
(Cable giant Charter Communications, which owns NY1, has said the allegations are without merit.)

Age discrimination comes for most of us eventually; 61 percent of workers over age 45 reported seeing or experiencing ageism in the workplace, according to a 2018 AARP survey. It tends to be worse for women, because of course, with some experts warning that we pass our employment expiration date by 40.
 
(40! That is … not that many years away for me, and it is frankly ludicrous to imagine that I will have done my best work in the first two decades of my career, rather than in the subsequent two or three decades when I really really know what I’m doing. But that relatively young cutoff point is also the age of at least one of the plaintiffs in the NY1 lawsuit, Staten Island reporter Amanda Farinacci.)
 
And of course the situation is so much worse for those working in television and other visual media, where “young” and “hot” are synonymous for women and where -- 71 years after networks’ nightly news broadcasts became a thing! -- Norah O’Donnell just became only the third woman ever to anchor a solo nightly newscast. Three of us, in seven decades!
 
(Not to mention that she gains that role only amid the slipping relevance and viewership of nightly broadcast news. What’s the dying-medium equivalent of “The Glass Cliff?” The Podcast Cliff?)
 
O’Donnell is 45, which is a little heartening; her first CBS Evening News broadcast was immediately the subject of articles about its falling ratings, which is not. But she’s also working for Susan Zirinsky, the (post-Les Moonves, post-Jeff Faber, post-Charlie Rose) first woman to lead CBS News.
 
Zirinsky is “a legend in the world of television news,” a January New York Times article proclaimed, listing her “more than four decades” of experience at CBS. She’s also 67, which happens when you spend more than four decades working at something -- and when you manage to keep gaining influence and experience, long after the age when your power usually goes out.

Lady Bits

--“I’d totally watch men’s soccer sometime. It’s not real soccer, but who cares?”

--“ The most intense battle in King’s Landing was between [Emilia Clarke] and the script.”
 
--Well, this dampens my enthusiasm for catching up on Big Little Lies’ second season, Meryl Streep with Skarsgard teeth or no.
 
--Will the next James Bond (or at least, the next “007”) be a black woman? Speaking of, in this age-focused issue: how is Phoebe Waller-Bridge so prolific, with Bond and Star Wars and Broadchurch and Killing Eve and Fleabag and 20 Emmy nominations this week for the latter two, and so … 34 years old?
 
--Wishing happy birthdays to several friends this week, including Kate and Rumi and Steph!
 
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