
What people get paid to work in journalism - laurex
https://www.cjr.org/cjr_outbox/google-doc-journalism-media-pay.php
======
reaperducer
I was in broadcast journalism for 20 years, and these numbers seem about right
to me.

When I started out, small market media outlets would find ways to pay recent
J-school graduates sub-minimum wage and make them feel grateful to even get
that. A surprising number of journalists, even TV news anchors, will have
second jobs in small markets.

A place that tried to recruit me in Indiana wanted me to report the news in
the morning, then sell advertising for the news in the afternoon, and half of
my pay would be sales commissions. Naturally, I turned it down. I dated a
newspaper reporter who did her reporting second shift, then worked third shift
at a small factory.

Once you get to a medium-sized market (30 and up), you can make enough to
survive, if you don't have a lot of debt or expectations.

It really wasn't until I got into a top ten market that I was able to keep up
enough to stop getting calls from bill collectors. Once I got into a top-five
market, then I could live well.

I loved journalism. I loved reporting. I loved telling stories. I hated the
pay and the industry and got out.

~~~
skrebbel
What does it mean when a market is "size 30"?

~~~
spencerwf
The size of the viewing audience.

Here’s the list for the us
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_televi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_television_markets)

------
lacker
So with 15 years of experience as a New York Times editor, you make about 80%
as much money as a newly hired software engineer at Google with zero
experience. No wonder traditional media is bitter about the tech companies.

~~~
ashelmire
Jeez, are entry-level devs really making 180k at Google?

~~~
chrisseaton
‘Entry level’ at Google means someone who is already top of their field so
it’s not surprising.

~~~
notacoward
Bollocks. I know quite a few Googlers, most of them hired well above entry
level but also mostly not top of their field. Entry-level devs at Google,
Facebook, etc. really are paid obscene amounts of money. Non-entry-level devs
are paid even more, but it's not quite as obscene because at least they've
done _something_ to justify it. Don't listen to sour-grapes talk from people
who washed out of FAANG interviews.

------
VonGuard
Can confirm. Spent 12 years at a tech magazine and was making $70K at the end.
Was laid off for being too expensive. Now I work at a large tech company and
make double that. Oh, and no one threatens my life if I get a detail wrong
anymore, so that's an improvement. Honestly, being a journalist is like
working in a kitchen. Super high stakes and everyone is always 1 step away
from complete panic and super stressed out, yet no one is paid enough to make
that kind of pressure worth while. At least in journalism, you get access, a
modicum of power, and the ability to change the world around you. As a chef,
it's just insane pressure for no real world-changing reason.

~~~
ssully
In my senior year of high school I was heavily involved in my school
newspaper. I and put more effort into that then I did 90% of my other classes
and some of my best memories from high school are because of that class. My
teacher would bring in local reporters in every so often to talk to us about
the field and answer our questions, and there was a very common theme of
'landing lob in this field is hard, the work will always be hard, and you
won't get paid very well' among most of the speakers.

Luckily for me I was also learning how to program in C++ in my spare time and
decided to take some computer science classes my freshman year of college to
see what the field had to offer.

------
jasode
Yes, the salaries for journalists are low but another factor is that even
those poorly paid full-time staff positions are _hard to get_.

For CS students about to graduate, there are recruiters competing with each
other at campus actively looking to hire you. On the other hand, the newly
minted Journalism/English/Communications majors often struggle with freelance
gigs with low rates[0]. They hope to impress editors and get their "foot in
the door" to a salaried writing job.

[0] [https://contently.net/rates-database/rates/](https://contently.net/rates-
database/rates/)

~~~
ISL
The same is true for most fields of academia, the arts, or professional
sports.

In fields where people are doing things primarily for love, they are willing
to accept comparatively low salaries, crowded labor markets, and poor
conditions to get a chance to do what they love for a living.

Source: am physicist.

~~~
paulpauper
has more to do with scarcity of talent and demand rather than "things people
love to do." Coding pays well because it is important and few people are smart
enough to do it well. Service sectors jobs are not fun and pay poorly and
there are a ton of job seekers relative to demand due ot low cognitive
barriers to entry. Most job that would be considered "fun" either have low
demand and or low cognitive barriers to entry.

~~~
ghaff
I'd say physics is a lot harder to do than your average SV developer's job.
Even more so playing sports at a level that brings in real money.

~~~
neixidbeksoxyd
What is "physics" as a job? The problem with physics is that there are few
applied physics jobs compared to CS and applied CS (software developer) jobs.
Similar things can be said about CS, there aren't very many CS jobs and I'd
say it's comparable in difficulty to physics.

~~~
saagarjha
> The problem with physics is that there are few applied physics jobs compared
> to CS and applied CS (software developer) jobs.

Isn't every engineering job essentially applied physics?

------
cjlars
Reporting, like teaching, sadly falls into a category of jobs where the demand
(for the jobs themselves) far outstrips the supply of jobs. It seems almost
wrong because journalism (and teaching) is so important to our collective
understanding of the world, but the other side of the coin is that it is that
very importance which makes the jobs so desirable.

~~~
mistrial9
you forgot the important part -- ability to leverage others to make them pay
you.. it is the "elephant in the room"

~~~
Doodood
>ability to leverage others to make them pay you

That's an interesting phrasing. In other words: ability to provide a valuable
and scarce service that people are willing to pay for?

------
whakim
Background: I'm an engineer who has previously worked on research related to
misinformation and built data tooling for news organizations, and I now work
at a news organization myself.

Journalism is in a bad place in the United States. The number of journalists
has shrunk dramatically, particularly at the local level, over the past
decade. (In case it isn't immediately clear that journalism is a public good,
the decline of local news has been linked to increases in local corruption and
borrowing costs/debt as well as a decline in civic engagement in communities:
see [https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-
media/l...](https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/local-
newspapers-civic-engagement/) for a roundup).

I think there's a lot of work to be done from a number of angles in this
space, including exploring new and innovative business models for news
organizations; leveraging advances in technology and data science to improve
existing products; and encouraging shifts in consumer attitude (similar to the
way that attitudes towards paid entertainment content - movies, music, etc. -
have shifted over the past 15 years).

~~~
WarOnPrivacy
I sincerely believe news orgs are hugely (not wholly) responsible for their
own demise. I'll explain using print news as an example.

For newspapers, the internet changed the competition field, from one or two
competitors to dozens (maybe hundreds).

When that happened, US news consumers noticed some things. A multitude of (or
maybe most) editors & journalists are profoundly, unconscionably lazy.

I'll offer some Examples.

1) Lots of ink but not a lot of news gathering: Most (hundreds?) US news orgs
all lead w/ the same ½doz headlines - and those are likely Reuters/AP/UPI
reprints. How many national stories are in play any given day? Six? I think
there are dozens and dozens - and they're all ignored in favor for whatever
editors think is sexy. (I suppose editors tend to have similar tastes.)

Local stories are likely to be original. Well, except when they're parroting
press releases. Or worse - they're parroting PR without any analysis or
historical context. In this case the readers are given no tools to tell if the
PR is crap or not. This turns the journalist into the official spokesbot of
the police, government or local corporation. It's publishing but it isn't
journalism.

2) Fluff: Sports journalism. Celeb journalism. etc. Is it journalism? Lets go
in that direction some more. Stamp collecting journalism. Paint swirl
journalism. Concrete curing journalism. There are people who like those
things. Is that enough?

Consider this. Journalists are afforded extra 1st Amendment protections, to
encourage them to unearth and reveal misdeeds by the powerful. The intent
seems to be to help citizens learn where their rights and liberties might be
being eroded. Reporting that depends on those protections would seem to be a
strong candidate for what constitutes journalism.

I suggest that reporting on paint swirls and sport stats is probably a pretty
safe thing.

3) Lastly, uneducated journalists: One example. During the Obama
administration I'd participate in journalism chats. I had a regular question.
Did the reporters know that Pres Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers for
espionage than all previous presidents combined?

Now this could be a good or bad stat, depending on one's perspective.
Regardless, it was an undeniably powerful, historical statistic. Depressingly,
that stat wasn't well known by journalists. In fact most journalists seemed
resistant to believing it or they felt the stat misrepresented some larger
situation.

This lapse was a terrible thing. Whistleblowers have always been a
incalculably valuable to journalists, who were oblivious to what seemed to be
a crackdown by that administration.

(Fortunately, that's changing a bit & whistleblowers are suddenly revered
again. Or at least that's the lip service.)

Conclusion: To me, if news orgs want to survive, they each need to bring
something to the table. Some do. Some are exceptional. Some are consistently
exceptional. Some screw it up occasionally but that's reasonable in the larger
context.

But if news orgs are largely reprinting others' content, then they are largely
not serving a critical public function. Worse, they're abdicating the duty
inferred by their extra constitutional protections.

I believe those news orgs should die.

~~~
whakim
I think your reply misses a powerful factor: economics.

Newspapers used to rely on print advertising to make the majority of their
money. And they made enough of it to do a good job.

It's much harder to report original stories when you have no revenue.
Nowadays, advertising revenue is mostly driven by clicks, hence the rise in
clickbait, reprinting of Reuters/AP/etc. (as opposed to "real" local stories)
and fluff journalism as you mention. Local news has been hit the hardest
because these newspapers made more of their money, percentage-wise, from
advertising and classifieds.

(Also, worth noting: the link I provided contains studies showing that local
news _nowadays_ provides an important net good to society. So while you may be
of the opinion - anecdotally - that all local news is just PR, that hasn't
been found to be true in the academic literature.)

As to your third point, the prosecution of whistleblowers was heavily covered
during the Obama administration. While I obviously can't speak to the specific
conversations and interactions you had, it seems to me that you're tarring
journalism with an incredibly broad brush by calling journalists uneducated
based on a few chats (also, journalists cover a wide variety of subjects -
were the journalists you were chatting with covering national politics?).
There are more and less educated journalists, just as there are in every
profession.

Obviously the old models don't work for journalism, and a lot of the onus is
on journalism to change and to innovate. But if we value journalism as a
society, some of it is also on us to change the way society works. I think the
challenge is not dissimilar to what we saw with movies/music in the early 00's
when piracy was rampant. The rise of streaming and the willingness of the
general public to pay for entertainment media again has been a game-changer in
that industry.

~~~
WarOnPrivacy
The flaws and issues I brought up weren't caused by post-1995 realities. They
were what news consumers had been given for a long time, in exchange for their
subscription dollars & eyeball time.

The demise of news kingdoms happened when it became impossible for us to
ignore what we were getting for our money.

Going forward, the economics issues are as stark and complex as you say. A new
challenge is they're being used to justify feeding us the same diet of crap
(not exclusively - wonderful exceptions abound) that our parents were served.

In the midst of all this is a comprehensive lack of self-awareness by news
orgs who exist to state reality in helpful terms. Step One should be clearly
stating the core reasons that quiet Americans lost their trust in the press.
It's been 20 years and news orgs are still unable (again, lots of exceptions
like CJR) to discuss these crippling flaws. How can any economic solutions
help if news orgs offer little more than fluff, recycled content and 1st-
impression reporting?

~~~
whakim
I don't agree with your assertion that "the demise of news kingdoms happened
when it became impossible for us to ignore what we were getting for our
money," and I haven't seen any literature which would back up the argument
that people suddenly woke and realized "we ain't paying for this shit
anymore." There is, however, plenty of literature showing that with the advent
of the internet the shortfall in print advertising was not made up for by
online advertising.

The "diet of crap" that you bemoan has always existed to a certain extent
because of economics. More people want to read about celebrity gossip or
sports than the CJR. The internet has simply exacerbated this issue because
the online advertising model rewards eyeballs and clicks, and what you would
call "crap" content generates more of them.

~~~
WarOnPrivacy
Your rebuttal places responsibility for what news orgs print - on everyone but
the news orgs.

So your argument seems to be this. News orgs have to defer their 1st-
Amendment-inferred duties in favor of printing pap because otherwise they'll
go broke. In the mean time they're going broke.

Americans have more sources of pap than ever before yet that is the arena
where news orgs want to compete. Like news orgs, you appear to have zero
concern with this plan.

As an aside, did you know that House voted to reauth Sect 215 surveillance?
WaPo barely mentions it in their own article.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/11/19/house-
pa...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/11/19/house-passes-short-
term-spending-bill-avert-thursday-midnight-shutdown/)

I doubt you knew because 1000 news orgs are thoughtlessly, compulsively
covering [SUPER SEXY STORY] today, to the exclusion of all else. I don't know
how much other critical information I'm missing bc (like every day) the vast
bulk of news orgs can't be bothered to fulfill their constitutionally-
protected purpose for existing.

Do you have a specific argument as to why news orgs are not earning their
collective death? Other than some belief that they should continue to profit
at pap, I mean.

------
bsanr2
I would like to see this for other fields. It seems as if few really
understand how the other half lives, which is a general cause for confusion,
and the unwarranted animosity that can arise from it, in society.

You could also apply the principle to diets: I feel as if weight management is
so difficult for so many because they have no real idea of what their meal
frequency and portion size are in the grand scheme.

In fact, can anyone think of any examples of issues that affect most of the
population, wherein lack of general knowledge of the spread of circumstances
leads to more amenable outcomes, individually or overall?

~~~
aripickar
For software engineering, levels.fyi is my go to

------
Cenk
Link to spreadsheet:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgd...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgdNlOrUar-
hJXvkMSeha2mHQ8/htmlview?sle=true#gid=1665107219)

~~~
iagovar
Clean the data, normalize, make some multiple regressions and you may have
something interesting

Edit: The data is honestly a mess. Good luck to anyone that want's to make any
analysis. They should have done a proper form.

~~~
danso
On the Google form, under the Salary header, there's a text box. Which imho is
fine, given the inherent complexity of the potential input (some salaries are
annual, others are by the hour or by the story, with a cap on the latter), and
without adding multiple fields to the form.

------
jdminhbg
> A web producer for Wirecutter, the consumer review site now owned by the New
> York Times, makes just $45,000, according to the list. An editor at the same
> site with three years of experience has a salary of only $62,000. For a job
> based in New York City, that seems barely livable.

The median _household_ income in NYC is ~$51k:
[https://project.wnyc.org/median-income-
nabes/](https://project.wnyc.org/median-income-nabes/)

~~~
WarOnPrivacy
That'd be excellent pay in most of rural America (the ~99%).

~~~
eli
That’s not what the 99% means. Most Americans live in a city. Relatively few
people love in rural areas.

------
denkmoon
How many people actually pay for news? I certainly don't, not in the
traditional sense of paying for WSJ or NYT subscription (I donate to youtubers
that cover current affairs).

Most revenue from news must come from advertising, and I think advertising is
a poisoned chalice. It makes the news organisations beholden to corporations
they should be reporting on, and fulfils the adage "news is what they don't
want you to hear, everything else is PR".

~~~
danko
For the NY Times, the assertion that most of their revenue comes from
advertising just isn't true. 60% of their revenue now comes from subscription
fees, and advertising's slice of their revenue has shrunk consistently.

[https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login-
required/5gNimvTR/New...](https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login-
required/5gNimvTR/New-York-Times-Revenues-How-Does-New-York-Times-Make-
Money-?fromforbesandarticle=nyt191029)

~~~
danso
To be fair, getting high percentage revenue from subscriptions is a very
recent phenomenon, and the NYT is one of the exclusive few (arguably the only
one) that is finding this strategy and trend to be viable.

~~~
shaklee3
I think they're mainly benefiting from the Trump era. When it ends, I think
their subscription numbers will plummet, since there won't be so many shocking
things happening every day.

------
excalibur
Wow, reporters make squat. Editing is a bit more lucrative.

~~~
ghaff
Leaving aside copyeditors, etc. editors tend to be more senior. Furthermore, a
lot of "editors" also write stories; it can be more an indication of seniority
than an indication that they just assign stories and edit other people's work.
(Which there's often not a huge amount of these days.)

------
rb808
Its not great but its not terrible. Just software is way overpaid.

Median Household Income 2017

Bronx $37,397 Brooklyn $56,942 Manhattan $85,071 Queens $64,509 Staten Island
$79,201 New York City $60,879 New York State $64,894 United States $60,336

[https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/income-
taxes/med_hhold_i...](https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/income-
taxes/med_hhold_income.htm)

~~~
js2
> Just software is way overpaid.

That indicates to me how underpaid most other jobs are, not that programmers
are way overpaid.

~~~
Zhenya
Or, you know, the market is dictating the rate.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
The market is rarely as good at setting prices as its most ardent defenders
claim. (Or, to be fair, as bad at setting them as its most ardent critics
claim.)

~~~
iudqnolq
What does this statement tell anyone reading it? Or, in pretentious terms,
this involves an argumentum ad temperantiam (fallacy that you can compare two
unquantified extremes and get something useful)

------
yepthatsreality
Relative: [http://whopayswriters.com](http://whopayswriters.com)

------
AmVess
Low pay, long hours, difficulty of obtaining employment, low long term
stability of employment for most places.

The state I used to live in had two newspapers employing maybe 1000 people
between them.

Now, there is one newspaper that went bankrupt and lost the building they were
in. For several months, there was no statewide newspaper. The bankrupt
newspaper was resurrected and now employs less than 20 people, and is
primarily an AP news reprinting service with two pages of local news on the
weekend.

I worked there one summer in college and briefly after college. I filled in on
the city desk a few times, and it was an interesting experience putting out a
good daily rag that had excellent content for the most part.

The resurrected paper doesn't even have their own printing press anymore. A
local print shop runs them out.

------
AllegedAlec
> A web producer for Wirecutter, the consumer review site now owned by the New
> York Times, makes just $45,000, according to the list. An editor at the same
> site with three years of experience has a salary of only $62,000. For a job
> based in New York City, that seems barely livable. A deputy editor with the
> Times with 15 years experience reportedly makes $145,000, but those kinds of
> figures are the exception rather than the rule. A senior video producer at
> USA Today makes just $50,000.

Nothing wrong with any of those salaries. It's more than I earn.

~~~
7402
Do you live in New York City? I think that's the point.

------
siruncledrew
The spreadsheet
([https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgd...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgdNlOrUar-
hJXvkMSeha2mHQ8/htmlview#)) could use some normalization and sanitation, but
this would make some very interesting data stories.

I tried to find data on media trends to cross-reference the salary data with
industry revenue to get a better understanding, and the best source I could
find was Pew Research ([https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/digital-
news/](https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/digital-news/)) but it only
covers Digital News.

Overall, my initial gatherings from perusing the spreadsheet are:

\- Don't expect to see Software Engineer salaries in the dataset (6-figures is
the exception, not the norm).

\- Biggest surprise was a Reporter in Boston with a 22-year career making
$62k/yr.

\- The most frequent locations seem to be NY, DC, Boston, and LA (perhaps
unsurprisingly), so I'm not sure how capturing that is of wider domestic and
international salary information/trends for the industry.

Another question: I wonder how profitable these companies listed in the
spreadsheet are, and how much their owners are making?

------
ghaff
Journalism has never paid great. And a lot of jobs for those who weren't at
the top of the heap weren't that great in other ways as well.

The stark contrast is with software jobs at a few companies in a few locales.
But, in general, it's hardly surprising that journalists often end up in
other, sometimes adjacent, jobs that value being able to deliver quality prose
quickly.

I know a lot of people who have worked as journalists who work for tech
companies in various roles.

------
zuhayeer
As one of the founders of [http://levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi), it’s great
to see transparency enter journalism. We’re working on some new tracks
including media / publishing and hope to provide some nice visuals alongside
some of the data.

One of the things that we do on our site is collect official offers
anonymously, which we use to benchmark non-verified submissions. Might be
interesting here too!

------
feltmind
This links to the U.S. Department of Labor's prevailing wage database. Sort by
geography, then job:
[https://flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx](https://flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx)

~~~
danso
This seems to be a direct link to "Reporters and Correspondents", for
employment and wages through May 2018:
[https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes273022.htm](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes273022.htm)

------
trident1000
For every 1 good journalist and editor that has their career stagnate because
they are not sensational or biast (or bends the knee to management agendas),
there 4 shitty journalists and editors that progress because they are masters
of bullshit and manipulation.

The salary and cut throat competition is why the worst rise to the top and we
have this cesspool of a news feed we see now on a daily basis. I just stick to
WSJ, Bloomberg, and this website to get the headlines that actually matter and
ignore the rest of the bullshit.

------
Nelkins
It's harsh, but it really just comes down to supply and demand. The barrier to
entry is basically zilch, and lots of people want to do it. Same story with
acting.

Frankly (and this is just my opinion here), a lot of reporting is just very
low value. Analysis is shallow, or just plain wrong. I find that reporters are
way too credulous, have limited quantitative faculties, and tend to start from
a narrative and find facts to fit that narrative.

Talking about this reminds me of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, in which people
read a news article about something they know a lot about and realize it's
riddled with errors (and then promptly forget about it; I try to avoid that
second bit). I so often read things that are either only part of the story or
incorrect. Is it any surprise that there's limited value in reporting that can
be inaccurate as often as it is accurate?

I don't think this will ever be "fixed". I just try to pay for news sources I
like, and that's probably the best thing anyone can do (right now that's
thecity.nyc and ProPublica. I also pay for WSJ and NYT, just because they get
shared around so much and the paywalls annoy me).

------
ReptileMan
And judging by how crappy content they produce they are overpaid ...

