Will this business ever wise up and pay better?

My thoughts:

I always say the one way to judge salaries of journalists is to compare them to teacher salaries. These two areas are pretty much at the bottom of salaries for college graduates, with doctors and lawyers being at the top. It is also a good comparison because writers covering prep sports interact with coaches, who are teachers.

When journalists' salaries fall too far below those of teachers, it should be an embarassment to the managers and owners. Instead, management and a lot of veterans take almost a perverse pride in how low starting journalists earn, as if it is a great tradition of the newspaper business.

It's easy to blame corporate ownership and publishers, and blame is certainly merited in many cases. But the most important thing to do is to educate ourselves. Get the facts about salaries. Know what local teachers are making. Know what people with similar jobs are making.

We are always told you shouldn't share salary information. That is an idea which benefits ownership and works to the deteriment of writers. The more you know, the better decisions you can make. For the information on this board, we should all thank Webby.

Unions: The decline of unions is the greatest reason for the decline of the middle class. Being in a corrupt union is better than working at a non-union place like Wal-Mart. Before the 1960s, teaching was a profession which paid horribly. Male teachers made more than female teachers. Teachers overcame the idea that unions weren't for professionals. Their salaries and working conditions improved dramatically. In places where unions are weak, teachers (and most other people who are employed by other people) make less money than they do where unions are strong.

Paying people unfair wages will catch up with newspapers - and is catching up with newspapers. It isn't just that there is less credibility, it is that there are less interesting things to read.

I think changes brought about by blogs and the Internet may, in the long run, help salary situation because there will be more competition for labor and because individuals and small groups of people may be able to start their own websites which can be profitable - think cable television and narrowcasting cutting a piece from broadcast television and broadcasting.

 

Well, my thoughts:

Sure, the industry is going downhill, but come on. It's not like it's in the toilet. The industry is still doing fine.

I don't know too many industries where mid-level managers (sports editors and department heads and above) are making six figures, lower-level managers (assistant sports editors, assistant news editors, etc.) are making $70, 80, 90 thousand and superstars (columnists) are making much more.

I know of very, very few industries that pays its entry level personnel (preps reporters) $40 to $45K right out of college. Not even law firms do that. I'm not even talking undergrad, I'm talking law school. And I don't see many engineering firms sending recruiters all over the country to do national searches for every basic position and then paying their moving costs to get them to work there.

The average starting salary for a civil engineer is only $43,000. They go through much more intense training that sports writers. Spare me this bullcrap about low pay. The only people who aren't getting paid good money are the ones stuck in Middle-of-Nowhere, Iowa, or somewhere like that. People are stuck there because they aren't good enough.

A podunkville sports writer saying the "business" doesn't pay is like a career Single-A minor leaguer complaining that professional baseball doesn't pay. Obviously, we're not as lucrative as Major League Baseball. But there are a lot of industries out there (teaching and non-profit organizations, for example) that pay a lot less.

 

That's a big part of it right there. Deciding if you can live comfortably in that market for the pay,based on the cost of living. For instance I'm guessing it's easier for a family to make ends meet in a rural or suburban part of the midwest on $35,000 a year than it is in the northeast/mid atlantic on the same $35,000.

 

Snaj, I'd be willing to bet there are more than a few people on this board who will dispute your figures.

In any event, I just throw this out for the masses -- what if the Internet angle actually creates more opportunity for those journalists actually DO good work?

Maybe if one paper doesn't value someone who can write an interesting blog or gather audio or video, another one will. It seems like we're trashing the future of newspapers because they won't be like the ones of 10 or even 5 years ago. If you can work across platforms, it only enhances your value as an employee. The ones who don't WANT to change/adapt are the ones who will get left behind.

 

At the bigger shops, though, the baseline salary and experience expected for a Web-based producer is much lower than that of a comparable print journalist. It's possible that the middle scale will shrink as more content (and bodies) move online.

 

Let me be the first one to challenge those figures. SNAJ, you're insane.

Even at mid-sized law firms, first-year associates pull in $95-100k. At the bigger firms, its $150-175k.

When I lost my job 4 1/2 years ago, I had just gotten a raise to $38,000. It was the most money I made in 17 years as an award-winning writer. That last raise was 3%.

In nearly 4 years in PR, my pay has gone up 56 percent.

Spare me the not-good-enough bullshit. There are plenty of people who ARE good enough in this biz -- many on this board -- who are toiling away at small- or mid-sized papers through no fault of their own. Talent absolutely matters, but I've seen it time and time again: Luck plays as big a part in this as anything and you're deluding yourself thinking to the contrary.

And as far as recruiters? Where are the newspaper recruiters, other than at minority job fairs (which is another issue entirely)? At my university, which has a damn good comm program, there weren't any newspaper recruiters. But we had business, engineering and industry firms out in droves.

The only thing in your post that made sense was your first sentence. The industry is doing fine and still lmaking money hand-over-fist. Just not enough for shareholders or owners of the large debt being taken on by private equity firms who have discovered that buying papers isn't a bad way to earn 20% after-taxes on your money.

 

Bird, I think you wrote the "talent" part merely because you needed an extreme to bounce off of.

You need to revisit that area of it. Talent does make a difference between whether you're qualifying for food stamps or living comfortably.

I'll provide another major factor, and it's liable to depress any number of people out there. Where you start plays a crucial role in your salary history. If you start out toiling away for $21,000 in your first job, your chances of reaching $40,000 by age 35 are exponentially less than if you manage to get your foot in the door at $31,000.

 

Most of us aren't working at places with 100K-plus circ. That's not a model that fits with the career arcs of most of us who are in this business.

And even some of those 100K papers aren't going to pay $45K, depending on where you live. Even in some of the highest markets (SoCal, for instance), there are more than a few papers that won't pay $45K, even for an experienced beat writer.

It's a take-it-or-leave-it world right now. And too many people are taking those $21K jobs, not leaving them.

 

For whatever it's worth, since I started the thread, I'm 30 and I make approx. $40K. So I'm not on food stamps.

But entry level reporters at the New York Times, the pinnacle of newspapering, make $72. Top scale there is $120K. Kids walking out of Yale Law and Northwestern and Stanford walk right into jobs that the top people in this business make.

I'm sorry, but that's b.s.

 

I don't think that part's B.S.

What is B.S. is this industry trying to straddle the fence by claiming it's doing all these wonderful things when it's really hiring the cheapest people it can find, whether they can do the job or not.

 

Oh, that is, too. I used to - I admit it - judge people's success on where they were working. Little did I realize how quickly one could price him/herself out of jobs at even larger papers, by getting just a few decent raises at his/her current shop.

It's almost like the average person has to turn down raises, or not pursue them, to keep the dream alive.

 

Of course, the numerous fucktards here fail to grasp that.