"News Director" is the term for the head of the news department in pretty much every market in the US, not just small ones.
I guess I should have been clearer - "News Director" is a term I associate with regional stations, not network news departments, in the US.
In the UK "News Director" usually refers to a live studio/gallery director working on news output and with news-specific skills.
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I think in the US the equivalent of News Director would be the Technical Director (the person operating the vision mixer) if your in one of the few stations that are not automated.
Yep - though here there are news directors who work with separate vision mixers (i.e. people who press the buttons on the vision mixer) too. ITV News, Channel Four News, and for the moment Sky News, and the BBC Persian and Arabic TV services still have a director and separate vision mixer for their main bulletins, but may follow the TD model (with a director pressing their own buttons) for shorter bulletins.
At ITN they even call the combined role used for shorter bulletins a "TD" (which is a relatively rare job title in the UK - though at the BBC the original News 24 gallery positions were described as "Technical Directors" to differentiate them from the existing tradiitonal "Studio Directors" though both roles were combined into the "News Director" role by the early 00s)
The BBC have obviously pursued heavy automation for their domestic output and BBC World News, with News Directors there having to be skilled Mosart operators as well as directors.
<Off Topic - Sorry>
TDs in the US don't really map into a UK gallery role specifically - whether in News or non-News environments. Here the Vision Mixer concentrates purely on cutting the show (and/or screens) whereas in the US a TD is also often involved heavily in crewing and forward planning shows, and in some cases is also responsible for the technical quality of a show, which in the UK an Engineering Manager, Studio Resource Manager or Transmission Manager would do rather than the VM.