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At yesterday's Chicago Journalism Town Hall, I suggested that it'd be possible to replace the local-news functions of the Chicago Tribune or the Chicago Sun-Times with an online news operation costing $2 million a year.
A big part of that, I said, would be reporters making $35,000 a year and covering key local beats like City Hall and the County Board.
This idea was met with guffaws. Imagine... Reporters making $35,000 a year.
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What caliber of journalists do you honestly expect to get at $35,000 a year in Chicago to cover tough beats like city hall?
Not good ones. If your proposal is to pay that little for such an expensive city, than you shouldn't expect people to have college degrees. Most students would be lucky to graduate today with only $35,000 in student loans. Now, without student loan payments, sure $35,000 doesn't seem so bad for someone in their 20s, but when you're paying $500 a month in student loans alone, $35,000 just doesn't cut it.
There is a huge difference between paying people $50,000 and $35,000. You simply will not be able to get anyone that good for $35,000. If someone had a college degree (and was a good student), was a good writer and had strong Web and new media skills, $35,000 would be laughable. But you can't honestly expect to run a strong new media organization without journalists who are technologists.
The days of journalists simply being writers are over.
~Pat
www.patthorntonfiles.com/blog
No offense Pat, but we've got a team of staff writers at the Daily News working for around that figure, and doing fantastic work. I understand that there is increasing pressure to get a master's and come out with whopping debt, and maybe that needs to be re-evaluated. I think social workers could make the same arguments. They go through a similar education and face very limited incomes. Maybe journalism is being over-credentialed, and if we could find foundations that would provide us the funding to pay our reporters well enough to cover that cost, we'd love to. Right now though, that's not the reality.
Amen Frank! And the comparison to social workers is dead on. In addition to not being paid a great deal, they often work long hours. All the ones I've come in contact with are not the types to walk out the door at 5pm, let's just put it that way.
Let me also be the first to say that I currently work for less than 35k doing what I DON'T want to be doing. So I would be more than happy to make the same amount reporting which is something I've come to love. But I did't go to journalism school so even if there WERE any jobs to be had, I wouldn't be in line for them.
Maybe you've got too much experience, Patrick, to know what entry level salaries are like. There are plenty of journalists working for $35k a year -- or less. Entry level salaries 10 or 15 years ago, when I was looking, were typically $24k or less here in Chicago. $35k/yr would track that pretty accurately, factoring in inflation.
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