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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 10/14/2005 12:14:38 PM
Title: He'd murder a guy for a $25K/year salary
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From DANNY GALLAGHER: Subject -- Schultz column response. I currently work as a crime reporter for the McKinney Courier-Gazette in McKinney, Texas and have worked in newspapers for the last three years since I graduated from the University of Texas.

I agree that a lot of people who study journalism don't go into it solely because of the pay. Some of them were the most brilliant reporters and news analysts I've ever known, but they ended up working as phone operators for a college loan service because they couldn't see working for $8 an hour in a town like Austin. In fact, I'm the only person I know of in my graduating class that even took a job at a newspaper right out of college. But the problem isn't that the students don't want to take them because they won't make a lot of money -- the problem is they won't make enough money.

$25,000 is a low salary? I'd beat a man to death with a fish for $25,000 a year. Right now, I make about $20,000 before expenses, which represents about a $2,000 increase in salary when I first started at a small daily in Henderson, Texas. I consider myself pretty lucky given the state of the industry, but I'm dependent on my parents for car insurance and a cell phone, which I have to have for work. Plus I don't just write and report on the nitty gritty of our city within the company's 40 ordered hours a week. I take photographs because there are no photographers, edit copy because there are no copy editors and write a local column because William Rusher is the most boring columnist in the country.

Don't get me wrong, I love what I do. What I do is important whether my fish wrap is being read by the local citizens over that morning cup of coffee or it's being lined in their son's hamster cage as floor tiling. But it's hard to dedicate yourself to a job when it can't even cover a roof over your head. It seems, from my point-of-view, that the reason young journalists aren't opting to be journalists isn't because they aren't willing to invest themselves in the job. The job isn't willing to invest anything in them.

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