I don’t know how I ended up in broadcast TV. If I were to break it down to its simplest components, I would guess something like one-part fear and three-parts student loans did the trick. It wasn’t the plan; it was just what happened.

I’m a web producer, and have been for three years now. I spent two years at a television station in Tulsa, Okla., a city known for its antique gas prices, embarrassing racial history and Chandler Bing trivia.

For the last year, I’ve been in Portland, Ore., doing what has amounted to be the same work. In that time, I’ve learned a little about the industry, and I’ve seen alarming similarities between my two stops.

I know not all TV stations are created equal; the same goes with the journalists shaping their coverage. But the business of local news is sick, and it is not helping anyone right now, least of all the people trusting it.

Then again, I’m just a guy. But if you are thinking about going down this road, it wouldn’t hurt to familiarize yourself with a few of my hard-learned lessons first.

You’ll Be Doing a Lot, and Quality Will Suffer

Local news is so, so slow to change, which means most TV stations still don’t employ nearly enough people to work on the web. This isn’t the case for every outlet — I’ve heard legend of 10-person digital departments — but, by and large, the staffing is laughable.

I, myself, have served on extremely depleted staffs, ranging from two to four web producers in total. Some of the tasks the web teams I’ve worked on have been responsible for:

· Churning out stories, usually “inspired” by press releases

· Editing stories from “on-air talent” (in many places write entirely)

· Aggregating content from affiliates and the almighty AP

· Acting as a station’s social media producer and strategist

· Monitoring the social media accounts of those talents

· Keeping an eye on story analytics

· Performing breaking news protocols, things like cellphone pushes, text alerts and social news gathering

· Embedding various medias, requiring some coding competence

· Making sure the content works across all platforms

It’s no wonder then, that among all the plate-spinning some get broke. Quality over quantity’s a popular adage among broadcast bosses just as it is in any other business, but it’s simply not the truth here.

Too often, in part because of the stretched-thin nature of today’s local news staffing, broadcast websites are riddled with errors. The design of most sites will make you want to cringe. Writing gets rushed. Context gets lost. Digital policies struggle to keep up and changes tend to happen rashly, with department heads pressured to chase the elusive ad dollar.

Get Used to Sitting

Because you won’t be getting out much. Working for a local news station’s web department means you’ll be chained to your desk practically all day. And in my experience, you won’t be making calls or exercising your reporter muscles all that often. You will get very good at writing about car crashes and crime stories.

Hopefully you’ll still have the opportunity to write all those fun, challenging, meaningful stories you have percolating, but it’s almost certain you will have to fight tooth and nail to do them (provided there are no car crashes).

“What Is TV Doing?”

My fellow millennials, this is the question, more than any other, you will ask yourself.

I say it during each editorial meeting, where much of the newsroom takes an often not-so-brief respite from the outside world. Ideas are bandied around the table, and the one that happens to be “the most visual” tends to win.

I say it when the newspaper and culture mags in town break a story we had no clue about. I definitely say it when we do that story two days later.

I’ve been known to say it when a reporter goes the extra mile, works his or her sources, and nails a story that will have real impact on the community, only to have the news leadership declare the piece be held from the website until airtime.

Issues like these persist at stations across the country, and they’re much of the reason today’s local news product appears stale and out of touch. They also hurt my heart.

You Will Be Seen as the IT Guy/Girl

In your 20s? Have a Mac? This will happen to you.

At both of my stops, I’ve been thought of as such, and despite my three-month stint at RadioShack, I don’t know everything about technology. Full disclosure: I’m not sure I even know all that much about it.

Most of the time I find it funny, and you might, too. But there will be moments when you won’t see the humor, just the obvious truth that in a journalism landscape becoming more and more driven by data and real-time information, you sort of need to know how to use your phone.

I don’t mean to sound harsh here. Part of your job in a digital department is to make technology easier for the person using it. So when I was asked recently to solve an issue with a reporter’s Android, I jumped to it and was happy to help.

When another reporter, prepping for her next day’s coverage of the vice president of the United States of freaking America, grabbed me to ask how to make tweeting a link “easier,” it’s possible I failed to offer the same compassion.

Local News Leads Only to Heartache, and More Local News

When I got into this, I had dreams! OK, so you just met the most melodramatic part of myself, but he’s not exactly wrong.

Like practically any young journalist I’ve come to know, I had lofty but unrealistic goals of doing only high-minded, incredibly noble work all of the time. I wanted to cover war-torn countries and socio-economic policies. But with only a few real bylines to pad my résumé coming out of college, taking that job in Tulsa made sense at the time.

Whoops. The truth is bylines aren’t hard to get anymore. The Internet is the Cookie Monster of content, and it’s not getting full any time soon.

I was also under the impression I would be rubbing elbows with some network suits. Have yet to do that one. Truthfully, local news stations have very, very little to do with the networks. I think my only contact with them was about promoting The Voice.

That’s a sad reality, but an important one for those believing, as I did, that a few years of pumping out local news at a mid-market station might naturally lead to a hot job with the NBCs and CBSs of the world. Not to say it’s impossible, but I sure haven’t seen it.

Enough Gloom, You’re a Unique Snowflake

I’m very aware the bulk of this article could be perceived as a long, unfiltered, “woe is me” complaint. But there’s a happy ending.

You don’t have to be slow to change. If you’re fresh out of college and a citizen of earth, you’ve been living in nothing but change your entire life, which I see as a pretty significant leg up on journalists born just 10 years earlier. So really, why try to pay your dues at some place still operating under an out-of-date formula? Go write on Medium. Pitch a story idea to Salon. Learn some code. Make a documentary. Start a podcast.

And if you are drawn to local news, that’s actually great! The world still needs talented people to keep tabs on important community issues, and there are definitely avenues to contribute to that discussion in a responsible, forward-thinking way.

Just last month in my neighborhood, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber stepped down amid controversy sprouted from great investigations. Oregon Live and Willamette Week, two organizations that continue to adapt to their audience’s ever-morphing news consumption, were both integral to the prying open of the Kitzhaber scandal.

The point is you don’t have to work your way through bad journalism just so you can maybe be at a place one day that does it well.

You may have, at some point in reading this, wondered what this dry heave of candor means for me in my job. Don’t worry. I think I just quit.