The Momforce

It's easy to forget that all of us who are lucky enough to take advantage of flex-time, part-time, job-share, and work-from-home might have not had that choice not very long ago.  I was at a little get-together last weekend with a bunch of my old friends from my TV news days and we were trying to remember who the working moms in the newsroom were in the early to mid-80's.  We could only come up with two, and one of them was actually a freelance reporter.  Fast forward to today, when one of those same friends manages an international television news network's operation right from home.  Have Blackberry - will stay put? Sure, sometimes her days can last extra long when she has to talk to people in Beijing, Paris, Dubai and New York, but she can also go pick up her daughter at school every day.

TV News is full of "on-scene" jobs from producing news shows, to dispatching reporters, to anchoring and reporting.  But the number of working families that are part of it now has really multiplied.  A lot of it is due to technology, but it's also a change in attitude.  When I think back to 1988, I had a job-share with another producer, I do remember feeling pretty revolutionary, and so was my male news director who came up with the idea. He changed stations in a couple of years, the new guy who came in in 1991 nixed the plan which eventually led to me quitting, going freelance and then about 5 years later eventually transitioning into Public Relations to get a little more control of my time (I also had 4 kids by this point).