ANCHORS AWAY : Coming Up at 11: Blow-Dried Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

This society is changing too damn fast. Even for those of us who have nothing better to do with our time than follow what’s going on, no sooner do we learn and commit to memory one useful cliche about our world than it becomes more outdated than last week’s hip haircut.

So many of the handy stereotypes that the ‘80s brought us have already been retired to the nostalgia farm. The hotshot money manager in suspenders? He’s a jailbird. The Evil Empire? It’s the sick man of Europe and Asia.

And similar damage has been done to something else that looked as if it were here to stay: the blow-dried, airhead local news anchor who’s pulling down ridiculous cash for being either Barbie or Ken. Television critics, lazy movie comedies, even Walter Cronkite on the lecture circuit, spent much of the decade pounding away at the notion that these overpaid bad actors were a disgrace to the hallowed ideals of journalism. Suddenly, money-hungry kids (another ‘80s institution) started flocking to local TV news. We began to get accustomed to the peculiar idea that anchors had agents.

It’s all over. A weak economy, a bleak advertising climate and a group of media decision-makers chained at the waist to accountants are sending the seven-figure anchor with the two-figure IQ on its way to being as quaint an artifact of our recent past as “Miami Vice.”

I learned that the tide had turned from a New York newspaper. It reported that the contract of a local Eyewitness News anchor was not being renewed. Kaity Tong, a fixture at New York’s Channel 7 since the dawn of the ‘80s, was apparently committing two grievous transgressions: She was a woman passing 40 going the wrong way, and she was earning a huge salary. ABC, which owns the station, decided it could hire some telegenic kid out of San Diego or Albuquerque for a third of the money.

The story was written in a tone suggesting that Edward R. Murrow had been told to clean out his desk. Of course, all the Ed Murrows have long since been chased out of television news by all the Kaity Tongs. Now, her demise is what passes for the falling of a journalistic redwood.

You can’t feel sorry for Kaity (I don’t live in New York, but because she’s been part of an Eyewitness News team, I feel as if I know her). She’s been raking it in for a decade, and though the news story highlighted her academic credentials, she could be seen by certain unfair and cynical observers as part of the one-Asian-woman-per-station rule that has prevailed in TV news. (Why no Asian men? such an observer might rudely ask. Because they’re not cute enough?)

You can’t even feel sorry for local news viewers. The corporate types are right. A twentysomething cutie from the sticks who pulls down only an outrageously large paycheck, instead of an obscenely large one, is plenty good enough to read the lead-ins to the five-part series “Are Our Bananas Too Ripe?”

What’s going on here is a shift in the massive tectonic plates that underlie our media and other businesses. After overspending for years, they’ve decided to try underspending. The networks are closing bureaus (“If anything happens in Boston, we’ll send a guy up”), laying off veteran correspondents (“Couldn’t that kid in the mail room cover Congress?”) and trying to share or buy video instead of covering events themselves (“Mr. Turner, please. Yes, I’ll hold.”).

NBC, just to pick on the place that hired the genius behind “USA Today: The Television Show” to run its evening news, set up its cable business-news channel across the Hudson River from its New York news headquarters, in stylish Fort Lee, N.J. NBC’s operation that feeds news to affiliates moved to Charlotte, N.C. Ted Turner proved you don’t have to be in New York, with the unions and the prices and the cross-town traffic, to be in touch with the world. Soon enough, we’ll hear Tom Brokaw say, “Good evening from NBC News headquarters in Hermosillo, Mexico.”

Every business in this country that can move operations to someplace cheaper is doing it. I’ve been farming out this column to a woman in Singapore for well over a year.

Highly paid local anchors can’t even stick around long enough to accidentally learn something about the city they serve. As soon as they get into the unhealthy six figures, they’ll be gone. They were pitched to us as our friends. Now what are we supposed to do--go out and find real ones?