Future Journalists to Meet Uphill Struggle
“At the peak of the ‘dot com’ boom we were making $125 million a year, just on job placement ads alone,” San Jose Mercury spokesperson, Patty Hannon said.
That was back in the year 2000. In 2008 they only made $15 million on classified ad sales in the San Jose Mercury.
Journalism has become a much less prolific career than it was a century ago. The rise of online classified ad sites such as Ebay and Craigslist have forced newspapers and some magazines into endangerment.
Advertisers would much rather pay a small amount of money to have a banner placed on a Google web search engine than thousands of dollars on one small print ad.
Our parents would pay to subscribe to daily or weekly papers to get their news. Our generation stays well-informed by simply having access to the internet. The truth is, we don’t have to pay for our news, so why would we?
Hannon threw out a question that us Journalism majors must be asking ourselves: “If I’m not paying to get the news, how will I get paid when I work for the industry?”
As a student journalist, I have been told by guest speaker after guest speaker, that I better be prepared to work somewhere far from home for low pay if I want to get my career going.
San Jose Mercury columnist Joe Rodriguez said that it is even harder as a freelancer because you won’t have superiors to train you and help you learn. You don’t get benefits, the pay is low, it is hard to get papers or magazine to pay you for your articles. Some editors will hear your idea then give it to another freelancer that they know will do it for less pay.
I asked them, honestly, if we should just switch majors.
Rodriguez said that he has tried that and did very well in other subjects, but his love was for writing. We should follow what we love and not what will make us money. If we feel like we are meant to be writers and being in the journalism field makes us happy, then stick to it and we should be able to live a happy life and make decent pay.
So, my advice, make sure you are good at writing and that you would be happy to write for free if you want to stay in journalism. If you’re in this mostly for the money, go elsewhere; but I’m sure if you have already chosen journalism as a major, you aren’t a gold digger anyway.
-Justin Riray
Good advice, which I think works for any career: Do what you love.
ReplyDeleteWhen you're writing something like this, do ID the site/occasion -- e.g., the class they were speaking to at SJSU.
10 points extra credit