Last Updated: January 26, 2000
Printer-friendly version
Hiring issues
Competition for employees drives salaries higher and
increases the number of offers to young journalists
The good news? Newspaper salaries are on the rise.
The bad news? Salaries are going up because newspapers are losing talented
journalists to more lucrative media — particularly online media. Two recently
released studies back up what editors have been complaining about for some
time now.
Good journalists are hard to find — and when you do find them, you have
to ante up the money to keep them.
Results from both the Newspaper Industry Compensation Survey and the
Annual Survey of Journalism and Mass Communications Graduates bear that
out.
According to the annual NICS, released by the Inland Press Association,
experienced reporters saw a 5.3 percent boost in pay over last year. That’s
the largest increase in their paychecks in the 12-year history of the survey.
Entry-level reporters fared almost as well with a 4.5 percent raise
in base pay over last year.
The reason for the increase in pay is simply a matter of supply and
demand. More and more journalists are being hired away by online companies
or other alternative media.
That’s especially true for recent journalism grads.
“The best students are not going into news-editorial,” said Mike Smith
of the Northwestern University Media Management Center.
“In order to get these students, newspapers are realizing they have
to compete on a salary basis.” Figures from the most recent annual survey
of journalism graduates, conducted by Lee B. Becker and his team at the
University of Georgia, back up that claim.
According the survey of nearly 2,700 journalism and mass communication
graduates from 97 schools, salaries are up for the second year in a row.
The highest salaries were for online jobs. The median salary reported
for students who took jobs in web publishing was $30,000 — a 9.8 percent
increase over last year.
But those students heading off to newspaper jobs also saw an increase.
The median salary for a newspaper job was $22,500, up $1,600, or 7.6 percent,
from last year.
Not only were salaries up, but there were no shortage of job offers
for J-school and communications grads.
In fact, the percentage of students with at least one job offer at the
time of graduation is at its highest since 1988. In addition, the percentage
of graduates who had a full-time job six to eight months after graduation
was at a record high.
It’s not only the new kids on the block who are reaping the benefits
of increased competition. The same holds true for more experienced reporters.
“To keep the talented people, newspapers have to increase salaries,”
Smith said. And reporters aren’t the only ones seeing their salaries rise.
The Inland survey found that publishers and general managers saw even
bigger increases. General managers saw a 7.6 percent increase in average
base salary, while publishers’ salaries were up by 6.5 percent.
When you add in benefits, publishers actually saw an increase of 10.5
percent. General managers recorded a 9.3 percent increase in total direct
pay. Only circulation managers showed a decrease in average base salary,
down 0.2 percent, after a 6.1 increase last year.
The NICS is a confidential study that contains salary information for
78 job titles.
Brown is editor of The Post-Tribune of Northwest Indiana, Gary.
