Pay

There's less range for teachers, but that's a good baseline at the mid-level. Maybe its comparison explains why so many journalists are married to public school teachers.

 

I'd say if you can bench your weight, that's pretty good.

 

That age+$10K thing sounds purty good to me.

 

I fell into that range when I was 30. Worked at a unionized shop and was making $22 an hour. Figured I was making decent money. Then I realized it was really good money for this business when I stepped up in calibre and prestige and moved to a bigger city but took a $10,000 a year paycut for a non-unionized shop.
And after I got laid off two months ago, people would ask me how much I was making there and were shocked that I didn't make more. The most popular question was 'but don't you have to be skilled and talented to do what you do, why do they pay so little?'
That's the question I could never answer about this business.

 

I was making my age until recently. I moved up and I'm now making $5k more than my age (in a place with a super-low cost of living), and I'm happy with that for now.

10K more than your age seems to be a bit high for people in their 20s, unless you're the cream of the crop or you're living somewhere with a high cost of living.

 

That's an excellent comparison. Whenever I've gotten to the salary part of talks with future employers, I come prepared with numbers on local teachers salaries. It's a solid benchmark and easy to do, since most State Boards of Education are required to publish a salary schedule. A few states now have minimum salary requirements for first-year teachers, which would be a good benchmark for entry-level journalists.

Though due to these requirements, teacher salaries are quickly becoming significantly more than journalist salaries, I'm afraid. Where I'm currently at, I'd get an $8K raise if I became a high school teacher :-\

 

All right, so we've well established that pay -- especially entry-level pay -- is going to be fairly low in this profession. However, because this is a skilled profession, and because employers can't just hire any Joe Schmoe from off the street to do our jobs at an acceptable level ...

Other than joining a union shop, what sort of ways could we go about raising the entry-level pay scale so that we're not all eating Top Ramen and living out of cardboard boxes when we start out in this business? Or at least setting some kind of pay standard -- dependent upon responsibilities, location/market and paper size -- that's perhaps comparable to what teachers make?

I'm not talking about a full-on labor revolt ... yet. But it seems to me that plenty of other workers in plenty of other fields have taken more control of their industries when it comes to pay.

Why can't we?

 

flash, stop with the bullshit. everybody on this board knows you aren't a day over 29.

 

One thing about the teacher-journo comparison that hurts it: don't most if not all teachers nowadays have to have a master's degree to get a public school job? Or a private one for that matter? I know there's a lot of school districts out there with programs that allow you to get your master's while you teach, but you still need one at some point. So in that respect, they should make a little more money than us, I'd think.

 

In the late 60s or early 70s during the women's movement, one of the buzzwords was consciousness raising. While that might seem a period marker like tie-die jeans or the peace symbol, I think the idea of consciousness is the first step. Exchanging ideas on this board and being aware of things.

Buck Weaver, management thinks they CAN hire any Joe Schmoe off the street to do the jobs. That is the problem. And the lower the salaries they pay people, the more that is the truth - there are plenty of people on the board who used to work in journalism and left because of the lack of respect which mainfests itself in low pay, lack of security, lack of opportunity. It's easy to say that it's corporate suits in some distant city which is responsible, but it's people in the building where you work who are also responsible.

A lot of it comes to customs and unwritten rules.

Example - you aren't supposed to tell anybody what your salary is. Who benefits from that code? Management. The more you know, the more ability you have to do better.

A salary survey for each paper and ownership group which would be readily accessible would be a big benefit - and put the salaries in comparison to local teachers salaries and housing costs. It wouldn't really work for something like the New York Times because those are really big jobs, and wouldn't work for 5,000-circulation daily newspapers because those are, in effect, temporary apprenticeships.

Take a place like Midland, Texas or Rochester, New York - two places which are substantial cities and not real close where a large daily would be much of a factor. You take an entry level salary and compare that to what a beginning teacher would make. Then you take somebody with seven years experience and compare that to what a 7-year teacher with a Masters would make. Take rental costs what it would take to get an apartment in a modest but reasonably safe neighborhood, and the average price of a house.

The pressure would have to come from people who have the lowest authority to hire people - a sports editor, city editor, whomever. They need to say - "hey, I can find somebody who will take this job but I can't hire a competent professional and pay them $7,000 less than a starting teacher is going to make. We have to do better than this" That's where management has to provide leadership.

With this salary survey, this will place responsibility on the sports editors. Oh, I know they'll say, that's the way it is - but a sports editor who has salaries well below starting teachers salaries and unable to afford rent will look like an NFL coach with a record of 4-12 - maybe it's not all their fault, but the line shows the year, coach and record.

 

No offense, but I don't think this whole "age gauge" means much. I did way worse than my age for the first 5 years of my career, was around my age for awhile, and do way better now.

 

And, for the record, you definitely do NOT have to have masters to get a public teaching job. You make a lot more if you do, but it is far from being a requirement.