The nightly news remains the one television format where getting older is actually a boon, not a curse. Consider Babs, Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, Andy Rooney, or any of the other fuddy-duddies that are old enough to be your great-grandparents but are still delivering their teleprompted broadcasts every night to millions of our nation's living rooms.

But unless you work for the local equivalent of the tres lucrative CNN, being in broadcast news is no longer a guarantee that you are going to grow old with your viewers: in fact, recent economic hardships have forced some networks to cut back the anchors with the what amounts to broadcast tenure in order to balance the budget for the upcoming quarter. And to take their place? Cheaper, stupider labor in the form of fresh-out-of-broadcast-journalism-school kids.

“Basically, you replace someone who knows City Hall with someone who can’t find it,” said John Beard, (pictured left) who lost his job at KTTV last December after 26 years as a news anchor in Los Angeles.

To be fair, the 1,300 television stations with network affiliations in America don't have faces as recognizable as national anchor Brian Williams or a cable anchor like Bill Hemmer, and they rarely break above the million dollar salary mark, so finding a cheaper substitute than the guy that's been at the WKRU desk since Ike was in office won't make as much of a stir as say, Rachel Maddow leaving a channel like MSNBC.

So even though she's a recognized face, Sue Simmons better watch her back at WNBC. Another profanity-filled slip-up and she might not have a fucking desk to come back to the next day.