Somewhere out there, on shelves in storage rooms, in broadcast archives, and on ageing tape formats nobody uses anymore, is 25 years of my best work. News stories. Live sports. Documentaries. Features. Moments I directed that I am genuinely proud of.

I don't have any of it.

And for a long time, I told myself that was just how it worked in television. You showed up, you did the work, the network owned it, and you moved on. Keeping copies was frowned upon — sometimes outright prohibited. So I didn't. And now, decades later, I'm building a portfolio website and staring at a nearly empty reel folder.

The Culture of "You Don't Own Your Work"

If you came up in Canadian television in the 1990s and 2000s, you know exactly what I'm talking about. There was an unspoken — and sometimes very spoken — rule at broadcast companies: the footage belongs to us, not you.

Taking a dub of your own story home was treated like stealing the office furniture. Even if you shot it, wrote it, directed it, and edited it from scratch — the moment it aired, it belonged to the network. Your contribution was your paycheque.

This wasn't unique to one company or one market. It was the industry culture. You were a hired gun. You did the job. You left the work behind.

"The footage belongs to us, not you." A whole generation of broadcast professionals lost their portfolios to that one sentence.

What I Did Keep — And What It's Worth

A few pieces survived. A student film from 1996. A feature on an NBA player discovered by Phil Jackson in a summer league. Some clips from live sports productions. Fragments that somehow made it off the tape shelf and into my hands.

Watching them now is a strange experience. The production values are dated. The technology has moved on completely. But the craft is there — the eye for a shot, the instinct for a story, the discipline of broadcast production. That part doesn't age.

What I've learned is that a few strong pieces done well tell your story more effectively than hours of average material. Quality over volume — something I wish I'd understood better when I was chasing the next assignment.

What I'd Tell Every Young Broadcast Professional Today

The rules have changed. Dramatically. The culture of "the network owns everything" still exists in some places, but the rise of freelance production, personal content creation, and social media has fundamentally shifted the conversation around creative ownership.

Here's what I'd tell my younger self — and what I'd tell anyone starting out in production today:

Know your contract. Understand exactly what your employer owns and what you retain. Many agreements only cover work produced on company time with company equipment. Personal projects, side work, and spec pieces may be entirely yours.

Document everything you're allowed to keep. Even if you can't take the footage, you can note the credits. A production credit list is a portfolio. Your name in the credits of a broadcast piece is yours forever.

Shoot your own work on the side. Even small personal projects — a short doc, a brand video for a local business, a passion project — give you material you own completely. I wish I had done far more of this in my twenties and thirties.

The tape doesn't last forever. If you have old footage — VHS, Beta, anything — digitize it now. Not next year. Now. The window to recover that work is closing.

Starting Over at 50 — Sort Of

I'm not actually starting over. Twenty-five years of broadcast experience doesn't disappear because the tapes are in someone else's archive. The skills, the instincts, the discipline — all of that is portable. Nobody can archive your expertise.

But I am rebuilding my visible portfolio from scratch, and it's humbling. Every piece I upload, every project I document, every article I write is a small act of reclaiming a professional story that I let slip away by following the rules everyone else followed.

If this resonates with you — if you're a broadcast veteran with a thin reel and a long career — you're not alone. And it's not too late to start building the record you should have been keeping all along.

The work was real. It happened. Now it's time to prove it.