Low Salaries Still Stalk Rookie Journalists

By: Randy Dotinga Reporters at two weeklies in South Carolina spent a fair amount of time writing about the sorry state of education and the rock-bottom salaries of teachers. But they weren't exactly overcome by pity.

"We would laugh about how the teachers were paid quite a bit more than we were, at least $10,000-$12,000 a year. We just thought it was funny," recalled former news editor Holly A. Fisher, who herself made less than $21,000 annually at the papers before becoming a freelancer recently.

Fisher was living large compared to Lisa Marie Gomez, who landed a reporter job at The Brownsville (Texas) Herald in the mid-1990s at the stellar pay rate of $6.25 an hour. "It was kind of like being a volunteer," said Gomez, who quit journalism a few years later to boost her salary by becoming -- surprise -- a teacher.

Low starting pay is the dirty little open secret of the newspaper business. Rookie reporters, photographers, and copy editors cope with stunningly low wages, but the issue hardly ever gets notice outside journalism school and small-to-mid-sized newsrooms.

Maybe the monitors of the media, more than happy to chew endlessly over events at The New York Times, ignore the topic because they've forgotten their low-paid early days or used the usual methods -- connections, Ivy League degrees, luck -- to land decent salaries at a young age.

Or perhaps no attention is paid because pitiful salaries for journalists are nothing new, and there's no hope of change as long as there's plenty of competition for jobs. "It's very frustrating, and it's always been that way," said Bill Ferber, editor of The Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury, an 11,000-circulation daily whose starting reporters get paid about $20,000. "Our publisher has got to be responsible for the business, and this is what papers our size are paying."

According to a national survey of 2,739 journalism and communications students who graduated in 2001, reporters at daily newspapers started out at an average of $25,900 a year. The survey, conducted by the Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, found that reporters at weeklies made an underwhelming $24,000.

Journalism professors say they do their best to warn students about salaries. In some cases, however, the responses are surprising.

"I don't hear complaints about salaries from our entry-level people," said Scott Maier, a professor of journalism at the University of Oregon. "What's more daunting is the prospect of moving to a small town in the hinterlands, being stuck in a farming town, a ranch town, hundreds of miles from the nearest city."

Along with the bad news, professors offer a bit of hope too. "I tell them that if you're good and work at a [low-paying] job for a year or two, you'll get a job at a bigger paper, frequently a metro," said Marilyn Greenwald, a journalism professor at Ohio University. "Once you work at a metro you'll make a living wage, a perfectly decent salary. I tell them that ultimately you'll make some money and you won't be poor your entire life. They're willing to believe that."

Indeed, many low-paid journalists do move up quickly through the ranks to a point where they can afford to eat more than ramen noodles. Gomez, who started at $6.25 an hour, returned to journalism after stints in teaching and public relations. She now supports three kids on her own through her job as a general assignment reporter at the San Antonio Express-News.

On the East Coast, sports reporter Rick Seto started out in the early 1990s by making $320 a week at a daily newspaper that promptly folded after he was hired. It took him five years -- and several dailies -- before he made more than $500 a week, but he wasn't too bothered by the low salaries. "To me, it was just a fact of life," he said. Now, Seto coordinates high school sports coverage at The Patriot Ledger, a union shop in Quincy, Mass. His much improved salary supports a family.

Both Gomez and Seto said their enthusiasm for journalism helped them survive the low pay. "I was in a position where I just loved what I was doing," Seto said. "Most of the time it didn't feel like it was a job. It combined two things I loved -- sports and writing," Seto said.

Passion does keep many rookies away from the temptations of public relations work and teaching despite the weekend and night work, the unwritten three-stories-a-day quotas, and the inexperienced bosses.

But what about poorly paid journalists whose need to support a family pushes them out of the business for good? Or those who never enter the field in the first place -- either after college or later in life -- because of the low starting pay?

Maybe they could have made the proverbial difference. But no one will ever know.