Low Paying Jobs

Got 100-week for a job I did for most of my life, non-journalism.
First paper job, $8/hour. Was thrilled I was making a wage, almost triple what I was making before.

 

This question also depends on the area you live in. For someone in Okla. making 23k I assume is very good. For someone in LA, NY City, Washington D.C. making that kind of money is hard.

I also love how I just read an article in Forbes that my publisher is worth $93 million, yet he is known as the lowest paying publisher in my area. I just don't get that.

 

I started in 1998, making about $17,500 a year ($8.10 an hour, or about what the receipt nazi at the local Wal-Mart makes). Actually turned down a job paying slightly more at another paper to come here.

 

He's making money for a reason. You want to work at a newspaper that's losing money -- that means they're spending it.

 

Made about $23,000 at my first part-time job (29 hours per week) at a mid-size daily in college town.


First fulltime job, $19,500 at 9K daily.

 

Today's letters column at Romanesko is currently ablaze with this topic.

Bottom line: unless your daddy's rich, or you're one in a million . . . lotsa luck.

 

I had a whole rant prepared for this thread, but then I read the Romanesko letters and it covered everything I wanted to say.

One very, very interesting point that was brought up: if salaries dictate that media outlets can only hire people who are able to be subsidized by their parents, doesn't that skew the demographics of the newsroom? You end up with a bunch of upper-middle-classers and not a lot of diversity.

 

. . . and the trend's accelerating.

You have the world's worst-paying profession, and certain broad trends become well-nigh inevitable.

 

Another interesting point on the Romenesko thread: The concept of the "teaching newspaper," which some romantics believe is a role that small, low-paying newspapers could serve.

This of course is completely silly, because being a "teaching newspaper" takes resources, too. Generally, speaking, if you look around a small newsroom with low-paid people, you're not going to have somebody with the broad experience necessary to be a good teacher. Nobody's staying at one of those papers long enough to gain and share that experience, not if they can get a better-paying job elsewhere, and these papers aren't offering salaries to attract the kind of talent necessary at the management level to provide it.

Even at larger newspapers, time was when there could be a "content development" editor or a "writing coach" ... titles which basically equated to "layoff fodder" a few years down the line.

 

1993, first year as free lancer, $9000 in one of the most expensive cities in the Northeast. Like pay for musicians, free lance rates haven't moved in real dollars in fifty years. While poking around on another story once I stumbled across some stuff on/by Al Hirshberg, who was a fairly well known free-lancer in the 1950s and 60s. He would do 4-6 rather pedestrian features a year and pull down $3-5000 for each,plenty back then to buy a big house in an exclusive suburb.

 

I think I got in on the caboose of that train at my first paper, thankfully. This was in 2001, and it was the classic "stepping stone" situation -- and I did, indeed, learn a lot from the veterans who were there. Then management changed, priorities changed, the turnover began and the teaching ended.

Hell, I ended up being a "coach" for close to a year until I found myself a better job, and hightailed it out of there like everyone else. Did the best I could in that situation, but ... c'mon. That job is better handled by somebody with experience.

 

Thought this was a JRC thread..sorry..carry on