The picture is a bit unclear, with the data we have available. For example, the NYT is paying journalists more than they ever have, historically (this is why s

The picture is a bit unclear, with the data we have available. For example, the NYT is paying journalists more than they ever have, historically (this is why so many big names are working for them in the last few years). They also are employing more people as journalists than they have historically. It appears that we're going through two trends in news. One is centralization at the news aggregation level (i.e. newspapers, whatever), which benefits the journalists who ride that centralization and harms the journalists who find themselves outside. The other trend is decentralization at the news production level (individual journalists), which benefits the small number of journalists who can capitalize upon a platform for themselves as individuals online and "harms" (scare quotes because it's hard to quantify) the companies who cannot collect rent on their talent, and consumers who depend on companies for news aggregation. There are a lot of people in this second category who would not classify themselves as "journalists", but are still "producing news". Their income is difficult to measure, since they are usually not W-2 employees, and may not identify as journalists. Together, these trends may actually increase the size of the pool of people who can plausibly be called "journalist"s, and increase wages along with it. But it's a much more difficult universe to measure and segment, so the data might not agree with reality for a while.