How Much do Journalists Get Paid?
If you are one of the nation’s handful of celebrity writers you can probably name your price. That might well be around 300,000 a year or more. Perhaps up to a fiver a word for freelances. Newly trained reporters on the worst paid regional papers might be trying to make do on 8,000 a year. Freelance contributors to, say, the computer or gardening page might hope for a token 25 for the page, or two-and-a half pence a word. Somewhere between those extremes lie most working journalists. For the vast majority, journalism is neither a branch of show business nor a spectacularly cruel form of exploitation. This is an industry with a lot of enthusiastic, even desperate hopefuls. So at the entry level there are far more wannabes than there are jobs, which keeps starting salaries discouragingly low and means competition is fierce. This seems alarmingly true of television – where the proliferating cable channels and indie production companies will take on junior ‘staff’ as unpaid apprentices. On
