What do you make?

$20K at small daily starting in 2004, $17K as SE at weekly in 2005 and $25K as sports reporter in 2007.

At the last job, I got a $4.5K raise and was moved to salary after being named SE, so in nine years I never reached $30K. As others said, thank God that I'm done doing this full-time.

 

Yeah. That's why it was a huge help being married to a pharmacist.
With OT and mileage, I cleared 30K for the year, but last fall we were told no OT and after I was let go, my former co-worker was working with no OT. The only benefit was I could finagle my schedule so my wife and I didn't have to pay for day care, so it was an imaginary bump in pay.
Currently my unemployment check is about 100 bucks less than my weekly paycheck, which is cool because I work 45 fewer hours, drive less miles and get to raise my daughter, see my wife and do things whenever I want.
Talking about getting back to work with my wife, if I'm taking a 9-5 I'm gonna have to make at least 50K in a non-journo job to offset the daycare costs and doing something I don't love. If one of the state's other papers had an opening and would work around my schedule, I'd take 12.50 an hour again without blinking.

 

The paper I left stopped contributing to our 401K in 2008 when they also cut our pay. The 401K was grossly mismanaged in as much they gave us little to no guidance/support, and the fees were pretty high. I went with an outside guy and a Roth years ago. When I left, I moved the paper's 401K stuff to an IRA with my guy, and it took off. I later found out the paper's 401K manager was a family member of the owners so the job he did helping people wasn't scrutinized with the employees' best interest in mind.

 

Oh. See, I figured you were going to say that she can provide you with both sex and drugs.

 

Sex, drugs and money.
He hit the Trifecta!

 

Wait, there are destination newspaper companies?

 

If we can't discuss this here, where can we discuss it? Information is power. Solidarity forever!

(getting down from the pulpit)

I am assistant news editor/copy desker at a roughly 20K daily and earn a $33,500 salary. Of course, that's before health insurance, taxes, 401K retirement money, etc. is taken out.

In other words ... there's no way my wife (a special ed teacher), our two middle-school kids and I could get by on just my newspaper salary.

 

A long, long time ago...

 

I'm actually surprised to log in and see so many comments with hard numbers. Didn't think people would be so forthcoming.
I work in a union, so my numbers are "out there" on the web somewhere in the form of our published contract. Of course everyone at our shop was hired under different contracts, so we all don't make the same, and the longer they have been there, the more that they make. So my classification (copy editor/paginator) makes $19.67/hr this contract year and will drop to $19.08 later this fall for a year.
My previous jobs:
Assistant SE, then night news editor at 8K daily: ~25K
Sports Editor at 8K bi-weekly + afternoon drive DJ & production/sports play-by-play guy: ~40K (but was working 70-80 hours a week, switched to SE with PxP duties after a while and lost about $15K/yr)
"Part-time" (ie. no bennies) TV sports anchor/reporter/producer at 60/70s DMA market: 8-9/hr, worked about 45 hours a week...so like 17K?
D-II beat writer/paginator for 10K daily: ~20K
General assignment TV reporter out of college: $16.6K (had 2 roomies, and parents were in town to do laundry at)

 

Sports reporter/assistant sports editor at a 12K daily.
Started at $8.10 an hour ($17,500 per year) in 1998.
Same paper, got the last in a series of cost of living raises up to $15.05 (about $32,000 per year) in 2009.
Haven't had a raise since. One of many reasons I'm figuring out a journalism exit strategy.

 

I need about tree-fiddy.

(Three dolla an' fity cent!)

 

Back when my old paper actually gave those, it was generally in the .10/hr range each year. It came along with a story about the cost of news print, circulation, advertising down, blah, blah, and how they just felt like it was the right thing to do anyway, and the company would manage. Once I told them that was $4 a week, and if the company was so hard up they could just keep mine.