Newspapers are dying not only because readership is dying off, but also because few journalism students have any incentive to work for them.<\/p>\n
When I graduated college, writing for a newspaper was glamorous — a dream come true.<\/p>\n
After all, Superman … Clark Kent … was a newspaper reporter!<\/p>\n
Even though I didn’t have a journalism degree (I majored in chemical engineering), I sent letters and resumes to 300 newspapers.<\/p>\n
I got only one interview — the Associated Press in Buffalo, NY — and they didn’t hire me.<\/p>\n
Today, if you graduate with a B.S. in journalism, you have no incentive to write for a newspaper.<\/p>\n
It isn’t glamorous — print media are moribund — and to add insult to injury, it pays poorly vs. the Internet.<\/p>\n
According to an article in the Folio: Superbook 2009 (p. 9), the average salary of a journalism major going to work for a daily newspaper (where pay is much higher than weeklies) is $28,000.<\/p>\n
Beginning TV journalists don’t fare much better, with an average salary of $29,300.<\/p>\n
The highest paying job for journalism majors is online, where the average salary is $37,400 — 33% higher than newspapers pay.<\/p>\n
Is there ANYONE reading this blog who writes for newspapers or wants to?<\/p>\n
If so, given the decline of the medium and the lousy pay — why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Newspapers are dying not only because readership is dying off, but also because few journalism students have any incentive to work for them. When I graduated college, writing for a newspaper was glamorous — a dream come true. After all, Superman … Clark Kent … was a newspaper reporter! Even though I didn’t have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}