Will this business ever wise up and pay better?

It's never too late to do it all over again.

 

LOL. Maybe I should read strunk and white again. I meant high school gard. Seriously though, it's chicken and the egg. I could go to law school, but I can't afford to pay for it with my salary. I can't go $50,000 in debt on top of my undergrad loans. So what's the use of going back to school? Wife, 3 month old, and turning 30. My life is OVER!

LOL.

 

Dude, make the plan and work the plan. You're still young. The average American changes careers three times over a life's span.

 

I hope you are right Lee. Getting out of sports journalism is harder than getting in.

What do you do when all you wanted to do as a kid was be a sportswriter? Since I was 12 I wanted to write sports. Now I have done everything I wanted and got a nice college beat. I am exactly where I wanted to be when I got out of college.

But that's not good enough, and that is why I am up at 3 am. That and I was up watching some NBA games late.

 

Fulfilled every dream in sports writing you had since childhood? No better time to walk.

 

The business will not wise up and pay better, not until every possible opening is left unfilled because publishers won't pay enough. And that's not going to happen, of course. Supply and demand.

As long as there are people with four-year college degrees willing to accept $21K a year to chase a dream, there are going to be publishers who will pay not a penny more. And publishers know that when those people decide, "fuck it, man, I'm not being paid what I'm worth" and go into PR or software or technical writing or whatever and get a 50 percent raise, there are another 10 people waiting to accept $21K a year to fill the ensuing open position.

Would smaller papers benefit from paying a few select experienced journalists really well and having them 1/produce quality journalism and 2/mentor the young writers? Hell yeah, they would. Would that benefit result in a better bottom line and more money for the publishers? Most likely not. Every penny over $21K that they're paying those experienced writers and editors is a penny that's not going into their pocket (or their corporate parent's pocket.) So why bother?

A great many jobs pay more, and most of us are qualified for most of them. But until we go take those jobs instead of taking what publishers are giving us, it won't get any better.

 

Part of the problem, too, is that the public doesn't discern good journalism from bad journalism, at least on a local level. If publishers don't believe consumers care, why should they?

 

Cranberry, I disagree. Anyone interested enough to buy a newspaper can tell if it's any good or not. Both Boston newspapers are losing readers hand over fist because readers can tell that while both remain reasonably good products in their slots (broadsheet, tabloid) neither is nearly as good as they were five years ago.
People buy papers they don't much care for because said paper has a monopoly on certain kinds of information. My town, Lexington, Mass. is demographically off the charts. Six figure median income. Six freakin' Nobel Prizewinners live here. Everybody takes the local weekly. We all know it's the product of overworked, underpaid kids in their first pro jobs or longtime residents who're part-timers, the journalistic equivalent of the garden club.
Doesn't matter, and nobody holds it against the paper. It has a monopoly on most information about Lexington.

 

You really think the Boston papers are losing readership because the quality of the journalism has gone down? I'd humbly suggest the Boston papers are just part of a downward national trend that has absolutely nothing to do with writers and everything to do with the way the consumption of information has evolved. I live in a simiilar suburb (Southern Westchester) and everyone takes the godawful Gannett paper. Nobody buys it because it's well written; we buy it because for the time being it remains the primary source of local news and information. I think that will eventually change, too. Newspaper companies need to figure out how to keep their hold on being the primary source of news and information as it moves over to various screens.

 

Buck, you're wrong. A 35-year old stud is going to make way more than 45K. At most places that are 100,000-plus circ, the 35-year old college beat writer is going to make at least 45K.

 

The other solution is to put aside dream/love of being a beatwriter with the unpredictable schedules and settle into a regular schedule as a desk guy where the pay is better. After 10 years as a high school beat writer I loved the promotion I got to the desk. All the stress of being a beat writer gone, just go in, do the job, and go home.

 

Shottie, you ought to come over to the East Coast for a day.