COOKED
The bulk of the job — writing show copy, reading weather/traffic/news breaks, recording promos and commercial spots, sequencing music logs, cutting station imaging — is text-and-voice work that synthetic voice plus automation software already does at broadcast-usable quality, which is why voice-tracking and syndication hollowed out local airshifts a decade before generative AI. What survives is the parasocial local personality: live call-ins, remotes from the county fair, unscripted interviews, and being the recognizable human at station events. No license protects the role and no one signs off on anything, so the only real moat is listener attachment to a specific person.
Part 2020 shock, part continued decline in the years since.
Median pay $34,630 → $47,340 +9.4% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-5.5% 24,100 → 22,800 on the projections basis
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -5.5% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~2,300 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
HostAnchorHostessReporterAnnouncerPodcasterShow HostNewscasterRadio HostBroadcasterEntertainerNews AnchorOn-Air HostProgram HostRadio ArtistShow HostessSportscasterOn-Air TalentSports AnchorBoard OperatorGame Show HostSports AnalystTalk Show HostWeather Anchor
Holding it up: trust premium . Weakest point: liability shield .
Core tasks are already automatable Reading a liner card, voicing a :30 spot, tracking four hours of a music log in twenty minutes, and pulling weather off the wire are all tasks that automation systems and cloned voices already perform at air quality — the 5 reflects that only the unscripted live segments (a caller with an unpredictable story, a guest who goes off-script) still need you in the chair.
Some physical or field component You are physically present for board operation, mic technique, remotes from car dealership lots and fairgrounds, and station appearances, but that's a padded studio and a folding table with a banner — a 6, not a 13, because nothing about the environment is uncontrolled or hazardous and voice-tracking already proves the studio presence is optional.
No licence, no signature requirement There is no FCC license held by the announcer — the station holds it, the licensee is on the hook for indecency and EAS compliance, and your air name isn't attached to any filing, so a 1 reflects that anyone can legally do your shift tomorrow.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs Your discretionary calls are format-bounded — which caller to put on air, when to hit the post, whether a bit is going long — and the clock, the music log, and the program director's format sheet decide the rest, which is why 6 rather than double digits; breaking-news continuity duty is the rare exception and usually gets handed to the news department.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (5/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (11/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (6/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 18 of this occupation's 29 points (62%).
Embodiment (6/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to broadcast announcers and radio disc jockeys on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 43/100 — EXPOSED.
Explicit AI-voice disclosure requirements in broadcast — e.g. FCC's 2024 proceeding on AI-generated content disclosure in political ads, plus state laws (California AB 2602 on digital replicas, requiring specific consent for synthetic voice use) — combined with SAG-AFTRA's National Code of Fair Practice for Sound Recordings and its 2023-24 broadcast/commercials AI terms. If stations must announce 'this segment used a synthetic voice', advertiser and listener preference for a named human host becomes a purchasable, contractible attribute rather than an invisible default.
Task-mix shift is real here but narrow: the occupation does have two tiers, and if voice-tracked reads, promos and music logs are fully automated, the residual role is live unscripted interaction — call-in screening under FCC indecency exposure, live remotes, breaking-news local coverage, emergency alerting (EAS activation during a tornado or chemical spill). That residual is genuinely hard to synthesize live, but it is a small fraction of headcount, so the score rises while the job count falls.
Live emergency broadcasting: if state emergency-management rules or an FCC EAS proceeding required a trained human on premises to originate and interpret local alerts (rather than relay automated CAP messages), the on-air person owns a consequential ambiguous call — what to tell listeners during an unfolding incident.
Live-and-local content requirements attached to spectrum: if the FCC reinstated something like a main studio / local origination obligation (repealed 2017) or conditioned license renewal on staffed local hours, station groups would have to buy human airshifts regardless of listener demand. Watch NAB vs. musicFIRST/local-radio-advocacy filings and any renewal-condition proceeding.
The limit. Even with disclosure rules and a judgment-tier residual, the realistic ceiling is roughly the mid-40s. The moat is attachment to specific individuals, which does not transfer to the occupation as a whole — a handful of named morning-show personalities can be well protected while the general airshift headcount continues to fall through voice-tracking and syndication. Nothing on the table restores the number of jobs.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 1,090 | $124,810 +164% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 600 | — |
| Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin, TN | 560 | $48,340 +2% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 480 | $49,470 +4% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 420 | $44,580 -6% |
| Bloomington, IN | 360 | $67,450 +42% |
| Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC | 340 | — |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 340 | $70,110 +48% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 1,090 | $124,810 +164% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 260 | $88,030 +86% |
| Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX | 120 | $83,680 +77% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 29. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.