On the Upswing   

Thanks to a strong economy, a tight labor market and competition from the dotcoms, journalists' salaries are moving upward. But the profession still lags behind other fields.

DON'T GET EDWARD CASEY started on the state of journalists' salaries. Not today.
The veteran executive editor of the Capital in Annapolis, Maryland, has two openings at the moment and not a decent applicant in sight. The paper recently raised its starting salary a few thousand dollars--to $25,000 annually--and still no one is biting.
"It's the most dreadful I've ever seen it, and I've been in this business, what...45 years. I've never seen it like this," Casey says, voice rising.
Dotcoms have raided the 48,000-circulation paper's business department, snatching up three reporters in quick succession with offers of stock options and big paychecks. With at least three of its young reporters waiting tables on weekends to make ends meet, more of the Capital's 60 staffers are sure to follow the business writers out the door if the money's right.
Hiring outside the profession to fill newsroom slots hasn't really worked out. Neither has offering signing bonuses to lure new hires to the banks of the Chesapeake. The last guy who took the bonus recently gave his notice to go to a slightly larger Gannett paper in New Jersey. He only stayed at the Capital a year and a half.
"It's completely an employee's market," Casey says. "And anybody who tells you different has his head in the sand."
After years of reciting the mantra, "I didn't get into this business for the money," journalists are finding their salaries are ever-so-slowly rising. Across much of the industry--from entry-level newspaper reporters to photographers to local TV news producers--paychecks are growing and the job market is looking better than it has been since, well, maybe ever.
Small and mid-size papers are having trouble filling jobs. Top journalism schools are placing nearly all of their new graduates within a few months. New-media firms backed by venture capital are fishing for both young workers and seasoned talent. Print reporters earning six-figure salaries are becoming more common. So are stock options, doled out to newsroom staff with yearly raises.
Thank the good economy. Thank the low unemployment rate. Thank the growing number of Web sites raiding traditional newsrooms to find bodies to create content. And thank the growing number of magazines created to cover those sites.
"Definitely the trend is upward," says Bonnie Bell, director of placement services at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. The school expects about 98 percent of its graduates to have jobs within six months.
"What the dotcoms are doing is raising the bar in terms of salaries," Bell says. "At the same time, newspapers appear to be keeping pace. I don't think they are going to sit back and take this."
But before journalists get too excited, they should remember where they're coming from, the experts warn. Even if the tide is turning, journalists are still poorly paid compared with other professions. When the bar is low, it takes more than a few good years to make a real industrywide difference, says Lee B. Becker, a University of Georgia professor who has been tracking newspaper salaries for 12 years.
"The figures are up," Becker says, without much enthusiasm. But the latest climb in salaries isn't enough to get giddy about when it's viewed in the context of the big picture, which includes a slump in salaries during the last recession. "It was a significant drop in the early '90s," he says. "We have only in the past few years started to come back." Inflation, at about 2.7 percent last year, also cuts into any increases.
Becker's survey of more than 100 journalism and mass communications schools found the number of 1998 graduates with at least one job offer upon graduation was at its highest level in a decade. Starting salaries across the profession were up sharply, with the median new journalist earning $24,000, up 4.3 percent from the previous year and $2,500 higher than two years earlier. Those who took jobs with cyberventures were averaging $30,000 in their first jobs, nearly 10 percent more than the year before.
But other studies show not everyone has been invited to the party. There are still pockets of the profession, including small newspapers, radio stations and freelance jobs, where salaries haven't budged much in years. And though anecdotal evidence abounds, Becker is reluctant to say online companies are stealing away enough newspaper reporters to fuel a noticeable hike in average salaries across the industry. "Internet salaries are some of the best, but it's a really small number of graduates who have gone into it," he says. "If [anything], they've only made a small dent in the numbers."

BUT INTERNET OPPORTUNITIES have made an impact on the journalist's psyche. The old J-school wisdom that you can't get rich being a journalist doesn't seem so hard and fast anymore.
Reporters weary of covering night meetings or typing up obits can log on to Jim Romenesko's media Web site at www.poynter.org/ medianews and dream (see "The Romenesko Factor," ). They can read about New York Times media reporter Alex Kuczynski purportedly being offered and turning down a $210,000 salary to host a new Brill's Content media criticism program on television.
Then there's Line56.com, a new online business magazine, which tried and failed to lure three Fortune magazine reporters to its site with $50,000 raises. (Editors from both Brill's and Line56 declined to discuss the reported salary offers.)
Dan Fost, the San Francisco Chronicle's new-media columnist, wrote in February about the competition among Bay Area tech magazines including eCompany Now, Red Herring, Wired and The Industry Standard. Some of the magazines were routinely paying their top writers salaries of $100,000 or more, Fost reported. The headline, "Top Writers at Business Magazines Commanding Six Figures," caught the eye of fellow reporters.
"I've gotten more reaction to that one column than anything else I've ever written," Fost says. "Everyone has taken that in [to their bosses] and gotten raises."
Even if journalists are starting to take notice of each other's salaries, pay remains a mostly unspoken subject in newsrooms. Though griping about paychecks is almost an art form, revealing exact figures is usually taboo. Many journalists are clueless when it comes to where their individual salaries fall in the greater scheme of things, says Craig Branson, spokesman for the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
"I get this call once a week asking for salary information. From job seekers, from graduates, from editors.... E-mails, too," says Branson. "They ask, 'Is this a good offer?' Or, 'How much should I ask for?' "
There is no easy reference point when it comes to journalists' salaries. The industry has too many overlapping job titles. Too many mediums. No clear benchmarks.
Even the federal government balks when it comes to tracking the salary ranges of journalists. Editors and reporters--broadcast, print and cyber--are lumped into one category in Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys.
And even if your newsroom is unionized, the numbers in the contract don't tell you much, says Jack Stokes, a former recruiter for the Associated Press and now its director of employee communications.
The AP's contract with the Wire Service Guild structures salary based on journalism experience. A beginning reporter, photographer, graphic artist or editor will earn a base salary between $552.15 a week (with no experience) and $926.50 (with six years or more experience). But that will not tell you what the reporter sitting next to you is making, Stokes says.
"Base salary is just what it says--base salary," he says. "There are economic differentials, shift differentials...merit raises."
The AP will tack on an extra $36.30 a week for living expenses if you work in a small market like Yakima, Washington, and $110 if you're in a large bureau like New York City. More money is added for night and weekend shifts. Then there are merit raises.
"Your salary could be all over the place," Stokes says.
There are a handful of researchers and journalism groups that attempt to sort through the confusion and do annual surveys of the profession. Though the numbers differ from source to source, the story is the same: Bad news. Good news. And more bad news. Journalists are horribly underpaid. It's been getting better. But the future is uncertain.

ACCORDING TO THE FEDERAL government's latest labor force statistics, the median wage for those who identify themselves as reporters or editors last year was $750 a week, or $39,000 a year. Though the profession is nearly 50 percent female, women are earning about 88 cents on the dollar compared with men.
Reporters and editors don't come close to lawyers ($1,168 a week), engineers ($1,041) or airline pilots ($1,048), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Reporters and editors are on par with nurses, high school teachers, firefighters and telephone line installers.
Pay has been rising steadily, at about 4 percent a year, since 1994. However, last year the pay raises dropped to less than 4 percent, a sign things may be leveling off.
The latest statistics gathered by the Newspaper Guild, which represents journalists at about 110 dailies nationwide, tell the same story. They say salaries for experienced reporters are climbing, but not by much. In 1999, the average top minimum--the base salary experienced reporters are guaranteed in their contracts--was $796 a week, or $41,400 annually. That is just $5 a week more than the year before.
The best-paying Guild papers were the New York Times (at least $1,389 a week for reporters with two years of experience), the Boston Globe ($1,260/five years) and the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News ($1,200/five years). At the bottom of the list were the Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester, New York ($419/four years), the Hour in Norwalk, Connecticut ($415/two years), and the Utica Observer-Dispatch in New York ($387/five years).
The Illinois-based Inland Press Association says its annual survey also shows journalists are getting raises across the board. But the raises have been noticeably smaller this year.
"It was a big year for a lot of jobs last year. It seems to be slowing down a bit," says Inland spokesman Mike Chester.
Inland will not release exact salary figures, because it repackages and sells customized information to newspapers. But experienced reporters were averaging 2 percent increases this year--the worst raises have been in at least five years. The raises for entry-level reporters also fell below 3 percent this year.
Management fared better. Editors were earning 5 percent more, directors of photography got 4 percent raises, and managing editors averaged 3 percent raises.
On the broadcast side, television salaries are continuing to rise while radio salaries have flattened out, according to the annual Radio-Television News Directors Association/Ball State Survey. Over the last five years, the average television journalist's salary is up more than 10 percent, and top management is raking in more than 20 percent more.
In news radio, consolidation of stations has helped boost some of the worst paychecks, says Bob Papper, who compiles the Ball State study with Michael Gerhard every year. When conglomerates buy family-owned stations they usually help balance the books and bring some stability. But that doesn't always translate into bigger paychecks for the reporters, news writers and on-air staff.
"A lot of that has not trickled down," Papper says. "Let's say things are edging up. But it's real erratic."
The median salary is $43,500 for radio news directors and $34,000 for reporters at stations in major markets with a million or more listeners. But small stations, those with 50,000 or fewer listeners, are paying $21,000 for news directors and $18,250 for reporters.
The overall picture in television is better. "TV has moved steadily up and has moved steadily up beyond inflation," Papper says. "TV has been in what is better than a 10-year expansion.... We are adding people, and we are paying them better."
The median salary for a TV news director is $42,000 in small markets and $115,000 in the top 25 markets. Anchors are getting $26,600 in small markets and $118,000 in the large markets. Meanwhile, reporters are seeing $17,500 at small stations and $60,800 in top markets. The median photographer's salary is $18,000 at small stations and $40,000 in top markets.
For a change, television news producers are faring better than reporters. The new trend is for entry-level producers to make more than entry-level reporters. That is because college grads who want to get into behind-the-scenes journalism are rare, while applicants for on-air jobs are a dime a dozen.
The influence of new media is present in the broadcast world, but less acute than it is in print, Papper says. "They are certainly stealing people away," he says. "There is no question."
Is it helping to raise salaries? "Anecdotally it is, here and there. I think there are some individuals who have benefited," Papper says. But, he adds, "There is nothing I can look at in the salary numbers that says the numbers are increasing because of dotcoms."

INTERNET FIRMS ARE STARTING to make themselves known on college campuses as they shop for journalism graduates. At Northwestern University this spring, representatives of the start-ups were sitting side-by-side with their counterparts from traditional print and broadcast operations at the annual journalism job fair.
"Each year, it increases," says Bell, the journalism school's placement director.
This year, Tribune Interactive and other Chicago-based online news operations showed up. They were joined by quasi-news sites like britannica.com (the encyclopedia), smallflower.com (a health and beauty site) and participate.com (a firm offering other dotcoms help with managing their online communities).
But most Internet start-ups pluck their reporters and editors from traditional newsrooms. Business and technical writers appear to be in highest demand, says the San Francisco Chronicle's Fost.
In Silicon Valley, the dotcom offer has become a way of life. Fost has seen reporters leave the local papers for forbes.com, TheStreet.com, even the virtual pet store petopia.com. Some eventually come back to print, but others don't.
"I think there has never been a better time to be a business journalist and to be looking for a job," Fost says. "We get calls, unsolicited calls and e-mails. It happens sort of regularly."
Internet start-ups are not limiting their searches to business journalists or the Bay Area. To hear a colleague is leaving for some unheard-of Web site is a regular occurrence in some shops.
"Nobody is immune to any of this," says the AP's Stokes. "You don't ask them anymore, 'Are you going to a dotcom?' You ask them, 'What kind of dotcom? Is it an established dotcom? Is it a start-up with stock options?' "
There are signs a shakeout of the Internet start-ups is in order. In June, the bottom fell out of APBnews.com, a promising two-year-old site that concentrated on crime news. Nearly 140 reporters, including former New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg, were terminated and asked to volunteer their services while the founders looked for new backers. The same week, the high-profile online magazine Salon cut its budget and let 13 people, mostly editorial employees, go.
Even if their luster is fading, dotcoms have already left their mark on the industry in the form of stock options. Taking a cue from their online competition, several traditional print and broadcast companies--including Knight Ridder and Time Warner--have started dangling options, once reserved for top executives, in front of journalists in the trenches. Stock options are offers to buy the company's stock at a set price at a later date. If the employees stick around to that date and the stock price has risen, they can exercise the options, sell the stock and pocket the profit.
In December, the New York Times quietly surprised more than 140 newsroom staffers with stock options as one reward for sticking with the paper. "The options were one-time grants to the newsroom staffers whose contributions to the paper had been especially notable," says Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis. "The decision was made by the senior editors. The newsroom received a pool of options, then the senior editors divided up the shares among the staff in much the same fashion as they distribute merit raises."
A couple of television and radio stations are also dabbling in options, says Papper. But there is little hope that these options will turn journalists into instant millionaires on par with the Internet pioneers. The traditional companies' stock just isn't rising very fast.

DESPITE THE STOCK OPTIONS, the dotcom job offers and the small boosts in salaries at many traditional shops, veteran industry watcher Vernon Stone is pessimistic. Stone--a University of Missouri journalism professor emeritus who has made a career of studying broadcasters' pay--says even if every journalist in the country got a 50 percent raise, the gap between the news business and other comparable professions would just start to close.
Blame the media companies' insistence on bigger and bigger returns on their investments at the expense of their workers. "There is the need for such great profits," Stone says. "We've become a society of greed."
Stone says back when he took his first journalism job at a local radio station in the 1950s, a company would be happy making a 3 percent to 5 percent profit on its news business. Today media giants like Gannett, Disney and Time Warner would consider such low returns a dismal failure. "Heads would roll if something like that happened," he says. Last year, publicly traded newspaper companies had an operating profit margin of 22 percent, about double the margin of companies in other industries.
But not everyone is swept up in the good times. Weeklies and mid-size daily newspapers getting gobbled up by big chains often have staff shakeouts and layoffs. Small-market TV stations are having no trouble finding green reporters to fill $16,500-a-year on-air jobs. Plenty of small radio stations seem to be caught in a time warp. "I've talked to people who have been in this business with 20 years' experience, and they are making in the teens and low 20s," Papper says.
Freelancers don't seem to be cashing in either, says Dian Killian, a longtime freelancer and journalism organizer for the National Writers Union, a 6,000-member group of freelance journalists, technical writers and fiction writers. There is no evidence freelance rates have risen much, or even kept pace with inflation, over the last decade.
"Not much has changed," Killian says. "Of course we feel left out."
A survey of the union's database of current freelance rates at magazines, newspapers and other publications shows little movement. There is also little consistency, Killian says.
Glossy magazines can pay upwards of $1 a word. But plenty of alternative weeklies and newspapers are paying $100 or less for a 1,000-word story. That's the same rate journalists complained they couldn't live on a generation ago.
"You may find some publications that are still paying 10 cents a word," Killian says. "When people are still making what they were in the '40s and '50s, something's wrong."
Some Web sites will even ask freelancers to write for free for the exposure.
Freelancers may be getting left behind because, as contractors, they are abundant and the easiest place for media companies to cut corners. If one freelancer won't work for the rate, there is always another who will.
If anything, the explosion of new media may have created more worries than opportunities for freelancers. In June, the National Writers Union joined freelance illustrators and photographers in suing the Boston Globe to stop the paper from requiring freelancers to sign a contract allowing it to reuse their work in other mediums, including the Internet. The union was urging freelancers to form a united front.
"I don't think it's ever been more necessary. We are living in revolutionary times," Killian says. "We need to be one step ahead of that."
However, by late July, 70 percent of the Globe's freelance contributors had signed the agreement.
Those attempting to navigate the ups and downs in journalism salary trends agree predicting the future of the industry is a hopeless task. The uncertainty of the effect of new media and the unpredictable economy could leave the average journalist perpetually worried.
But Bell, Northwestern's placement director, offers some hope. No matter which way the economy turns, she says, decent journalists can usually rest assured a job, however low paying, will be out there somewhere.
"The demand will always be there for good reporters," she says.