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What people get paid to work in journalism
- Cenk 7y agoLink to spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgdNlOrUar-hJXvkMSeha2mHQ8/htmlview?sle=true#gid=1665107219 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgd...
- iagovar 7y agoClean 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 7y agoOn 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TurkishPoptart 7y agoThanks for linking to the real data. Why does everyone call themselves a "cis", though?
- excalibur 7y agoCisgendered, means they identify as the gender they were assigned at birth and are not transgender or genderqueer (Queer in this sense doesn't mean gay, it means they have some combination of gender traits that doesn't fit neatly into either male or female).
- theandrewbailey 7y agoHere I am thinking that gender is observed at birth, not assigned.
- danso 7y agoThe practice is commonly referred to as sex (or gender) assignment.
- bluntfang 7y agoThese gender/orientation demographics are important to identify demographics that may be receiving a disproportionate salary.
- mrep 7y agoHonestly, that doesn't look as bad as I thought it would be considering all the reports of how journalism is dead. US median wage for those with a bachelors degree is about $62,000 dollars a year [0] which seems similar to the median in the sheet from eyeballing it. [0]: https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-educatio...
- abathur 7y agoNot to suggest they aren't also struggling, but mostly-national outlets with a strong or exclusive web presence aren't the epicenter of the crisis in journalism--they're the outlets weathering the storm. Newspapers, particularly local and regional ones, are the epicenter of the crisis--and they are being hollowed out. This AP article (https://apnews.com/a0409119ab71400b944662fc770593a0 https://apnews.com/a0409119ab71400b944662fc770593a0) is a good place to catch up. (Anecdata, but FWIW: GateHouse, mentioned in this article, acquired my hometown paper in the past year. My mom has variously worked residential and single-copy delivery for this paper for decades. My stepdad worked delivery, managed a delivery district, and was an early employee in the paper's online operations. Subjective, but their stories, firsthand and from friends, make it hard not to see it as an extractive vulture operation.)
- excalibur 7y agoWow, reporters make squat. Editing is a bit more lucrative.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 7y agoLeaving 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.)
- bsanr2 7y agoI 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?
- bluntfang 7y agoI've seen this information gathering exercise be successful in other fields during conferences. These aren't your company peers so the fear of offending/being offended by your co-workers doesn't exist. edit: just curious about the downvote, any reason?
- aripickar 7y agoFor software engineering, levels.fyi is my go to
- magashna 7y ago/r/sysadmin did one recently
- yepthatsreality 7y agoRelative: http://whopayswriters.com http://whopayswriters.com
- throwaway0xb 7y agoLots of pretty good salaries for spending 6 hours a day refreshing twitter... edit: Downvotes are warranted, I forgot to include the amount of time writers spend discussing twitter in slack.
- excalibur 7y agoFor non-celebrities, Twitter is low-rent. Spend your day refreshing HN for a salary boost.
- mrep 7y agoIf you are business insider, it's probably best to refresh r/wallstreetbets.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- smabie 7y agoNo one in the industry actually looks at wsb except to laugh at them. The people there are... to put it nicely, uninformed.
- mrep 7y agoIt was a joke about how they have ran multiple stories sourced from there due to them finding bugs in robinhood and exploiting them, most recently the infinite leverage cheat code.
- jbob2000 7y agoNot just twitter, but Reuters. You'd be surprised how little actual journalism is done. Like 90% of what you hear and read comes from one or two organizations who operate as the primary sources.
- TurkishPoptart 7y agoDid this really require a throwaway? I thought it was funny.
- feltmind 7y agoThis 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 7y agoThis 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
- siruncledrew 7y agoThe spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgdNlOrUar-hJXvkMSeha2mHQ8/htmlview# https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgd...) 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?
- cjlars 7y agoReporting, 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 7y agoyou forgot the important part -- ability to leverage others to make them pay you.. it is the "elephant in the room"
- Doodood 7y ago>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?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- trident1000 7y agoFor 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.
- VonGuard 7y agoCan 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 7y agoIn 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.
- lacker 7y agoSo 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.
- ravenstine 7y agoSure, but journalism is a low ROI product, and some say that the news is just a loss leader for the media and the political establishment to have influence. The vast majority of news stories are read for a few hours and are forgotten about. Most news is junk that most people(rightfully) don't want to pay very much for, even when it's not junk. Both the state of journalism as well as what journalists get paid is pretty sad, but they might as well be shouting at the clouds. Here's how I think of it: I have no doubt that anyone could take a room full of software engineers and start a functioning news organization the next day. I doubt that anyone could take a room full of journalists and have them writing production ready code in under a month. (I worked with journalists for over 3 years and only knew of 1 who knew how to code)
- bluedino 7y agoWriting is art. It doesn't pay that well for most. But to think you could get good journalists out of random software developers is insulting.
- gpm 7y agoYou wouldn't get top quality journalism on day 1, and you wouldn't get as much per person, but you would get something publishable. Lots of real journalism is really low quality, so this means you would have a product that is in some sense competitive.
- iudqnolq 7y agoYou've weakened the claim a lot. Do you mean competitive with the New York Times, or competitive with The Register?
- tootahe45 7y agoSurprised how much they make providing so little value to the average person.
- rb808 7y agoIts 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_income.htm https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/income-taxes/med_hhold_i...
- js2 7y ago> Just software is way overpaid. That indicates to me how underpaid most other jobs are, not that programmers are way overpaid.
- Zhenya 7y agoOr, you know, the market is dictating the rate.
- chipotle_coyote 7y agoThe 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 7y agoWhat 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)
- uwuhn 7y agoWe haven't even begun to see the ceiling for experienced engineers imo. We hit $500k TC not being a completely-unthinkable offer for anyone other than extreme domain experts way earlier than I expected.
- manifestsilence 7y ago
- tootahe45 7y agoStill over-paid, imo.
- Arnt 7y agoFeel free to argue your case.
- wnevets 7y agorabble rabble lamestream media rabble rabble liberal bias
- dang 7y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments here, and especially not ideological flamebait. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- wnevets 7y agoIs it still unsubstantive and ideological flamebait if it accurately portrays the GP's comment based on their comment history?
- dang 7y agoYes. They are properties of your comment, not somebody else's.
- Arnt 7y agoI suppose I'm guilty-ish too... in a way... My ideology (the relevant one anyway) is that people should argue their case, at least briefly. But I ask/tell people to do that without a supporting argument, which always feels like an odd and somewhat dishonest thing to do. Sigh.
- dang 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 7y agoJournalism 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.
- jasode 7y agoYes, 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 7y agoThe 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 7y agohas 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 7y agoI'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 7y agoWhat 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.
- Nelkins 7y agoIt'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).
- AmVess 7y agoLow 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.
- jdminhbg 7y ago> 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/
- sixtypoundhound 7y agoAgreed. That being said, you need to separate Manhattan from the outer boroughs. There is tremendous inequality in NYC.
- WarOnPrivacy 7y agoThat'd be excellent pay in most of rural America (the ~99%).
- eli 7y agoThat’s not what the 99% means. Most Americans live in a city. Relatively few people love in rural areas.
- whakim 7y agoBackground: 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/local-newspapers-civic-engagement/ https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/l... 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 7y agoI 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.
- denkmoon 7y agoHow 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".
- mesh 7y agoChomsky and Herman discuss this in Manufacturing Consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent Good video / overview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M
- danko 7y agoFor 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-York-Times-Revenues-How-Does-New-York-Times-Make-Money-?fromforbesandarticle=nyt191029 https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login-required/5gNimvTR/New...
- danso 7y agoTo 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 7y agoI 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.
- erling 7y ago
- ReptileMan 7y agoAnd judging by how crappy content they produce they are overpaid ...
- reaperducer 7y agoI 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.
- tempsy 7y agoSeems like part of the compensation these days is influence - on Twitter, especially. That can be turned into additional income through book deals, which in turn can be turned into movie deals, etc.
- reaperducer 7y agoIn a small market, there aren't going to be enough Twitter followers to be noticed for a book or movie deal. And even in markets large enough for those to be possible, they're one in a million or less.
- skrebbel 7y agoWhat does it mean when a market is "size 30"?
- spencerwf 7y agoThe size of the viewing audience. Here’s the list for the us https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_television_markets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_televi...
- zuhayeer 7y agoAs 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!
- AllegedAlec 7y ago> 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 7y agoDo you live in New York City? I think that's the point.