By Lee Allen Miller, Executive Director
The job title has not changed much in thirty years. General Manager. You see it on station websites, on business cards, on LinkedIn profiles. What the job actually involves has changed enormously, and I am not sure the industry has fully caught up.
When I started in broadcasting, the GM’s job was reasonably well-defined. Manage the staff. Hit the revenue number. Keep the station in compliance. Handle relationships with network, syndicators, and key advertisers. Most GMs came up through sales, a few through news, and the job was essentially about executing a business model that everyone understood.
In 2026, the GM’s job is something different. At a small-market LPTV station, it is often about figuring out what the business model even is. Advertising revenue is not what it was. Distribution has fragmented. The transition to ATSC 3.0 is reshaping what is technically possible. New revenue lines, from datacasting to streaming to hyperlocal content partnerships, are all in various stages of maturity. A GM who thinks the job is still about running the same playbook as twenty years ago is going to be out of the business soon.
What the job actually requires now
Strategic thinking. Not just execution. A modern GM has to be able to look at the station, look at the market, look at the broader industry, and make calls about where to invest and where to pull back. That is not a sales skill. It is not a programming skill. It is a leadership skill, and it is in short supply.
Financial literacy beyond the sales budget. Revenue is one line of the income statement. A GM today needs to understand margins, cost structure, capital allocation, and the relationship between operating decisions and the balance sheet. I have seen GMs hit their revenue target three years in a row while their station slowly went broke because nobody was paying attention to anything else.
Technical fluency. You do not need to be able to rebuild a transmitter. You do need to understand what ATSC 3.0 is, what datacasting enables, how IP-based workflows change the cost structure of the station, and what questions to ask your engineering team. The GMs I see falling behind are the ones who treat technical decisions as someone else’s problem.
Comfort with ambiguity. We talked about this in the previous article. The regulatory and technological environment is shifting, and a GM who needs everything to be settled before deciding is going to be outmaneuvered by one who can act with incomplete information.
People leadership that actually scales. At a small station, you might be leading ten or fifteen people. That is not a small number. Every one of those relationships matters. Every hire matters. Every termination matters. The GM sets the culture of the station more than anyone else, and in a tight market, culture is often the difference between keeping your best people and watching them walk to the competition.
The three mistakes I see most often
Confusing activity with progress. Some GMs fill their days with meetings, memos, and tactical firefighting, and then wonder why the station isn’t moving forward. The reason is that they are doing a lot of things but not the right things. A GM’s calendar should reflect their priorities. If strategy and people development aren’t in there, they are probably not happening.
Avoiding hard conversations. Performance problems. Underperforming vendors. Difficult ownership conversations. Family dynamics in a family-owned station. The instinct to avoid these conversations is universal, and it is also fatal to leadership effectiveness. Every difficult conversation you avoid this quarter will cost you more to have next quarter.
Under-investing in their own development. GMs who are trying to do this job without continuing to learn are going to be left behind. That means industry events, peer networks, trade association involvement, reading. It also means being willing to admit what you don’t know, which gets harder the more senior you become and the more people are looking to you for answers.
What the job will look like in five years
I spend a lot of time thinking about this, because ATBA members ask me. My honest answer is that the GM role is going to continue to become more strategic and less operational. The operational work, including scheduling, traffic, playout, and a lot of the production workflow, is going to be increasingly automated or outsourced. What will remain are the decisions that require human judgment. Which markets to enter. Which partnerships to form. When to invest in new technology. How to retain your best people. How to respond to regulatory change.
A GM who is not sharpening their skills in those areas right now is going to find themselves competing against peers who are. And in a small market, where margins are thin and mistakes are expensive, that gap is going to show up quickly.
A practical self-assessment
If you are currently a GM, I would encourage you to spend a quiet thirty minutes with the following questions. How much of my time last month went to strategy versus tactics? When did I last have an honest conversation with my team about where the station is going? When did I last push back on an assumption I inherited from ownership? When did I last make a decision that I would have been afraid to make three years ago? When did I last invest in my own learning?
If you don’t like the answers, the good news is that this is all fixable. The job has changed. Your approach to it can change too. The industry needs GMs who are equal to the moment we are in, and that starts with each of us deciding to be one.
