I don't know how much they pay staff/beat writers, but lots of published pieces are freelance, and people get paid a few hundred bucks for them, tops. There ar

I don't know how much they pay staff/beat writers, but lots of published pieces are freelance, and people get paid a few hundred bucks for them, tops. There are a lot of people willing to write for cash. A permanent position as a writer is highly coveted and extremely competitive, which means that not only is it really hard to get such a job, but they don't have to pay much. Most "journalists" today are starving artist types. I would argue that "journalism" as a profession is dying. With the internet, we all have direct access to the news. We're no longer dependent on someone's reporter to come back and tell us what happened, and we don't need people in an ivory tower to attempt to interpret or even collate it; we do that ourselves with aggregation platforms. The future does not look good for people who want this to remain a viable career.