Digest 1/31/2022
Breaking the $45K threshold, the deathly dangers of being a journalist in Mexico, and more.
This week’s Study Hall Digest feature has been handed over to Yvonne Marquez, an independent reporter covering LGBTQ issues. Follow her @yvonnesm12.
PAYING YOUR DUES
I’m a journalism grad student, so lately I’ve been surrounded by veteran journalists imparting their wisdom to my classmates and I. And I keep asking them: how do you make a jump in your salary? After nearly a decade as a journalist, I can’t get past a certain pay threshold at $45k. I’ve gotten mixed answers — and mostly bad advice, imo — ranging from: switch to PR, work harder, ask for more money, and move to a new city for a job.
https://twitter.com/emmacarew/status/1486020498345668612
I’ve heard that last bit of advice before from my undergrad college professors. When I was on the hunt for a full-time job before grad school, I scrolled through many reporter jobs in rural and suburban areas in Texas, where I’m from. Did I really want to move from Dallas to Leander? Or Beaumont? Or Fredericksburg? All for less than $35,000 a year to produce a whole ass newspaper? For me, it just wasn’t feasible to uproot my life for a low-paying job, even if what I wanted to do more than anything was to report. Sure, I could cut my teeth covering literally an entire small town but I could also do it elsewhere, with the support of my family and friends while making more money for less work.
https://twitter.com/TheNewsan/status/1486075780253708291
https://twitter.com/DaLyahJ/status/1486127604025470977
https://twitter.com/OliverAshKleine/status/1486136121595674633
https://twitter.com/marissaaevans/status/1486111839360458752
These small and midsize markets might sound like a great opportunity for those who can afford moving expenses, but many of these places can also be unfriendly to journalists of color or other underrepresented journalists. Overworked, underpaid, and isolated? No, thank you!
In an ideal world, I would have liked these veteran journalists to just commiserate with me and connect me to someone who will give me a job that pays me well after I graduate!
THIRD JOURNALIST KILLED IN MEXICO
Journalist Lourdes Maldonado López was fatally shot outside her home in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico on Jan. 23, making her the third journalist killed in the country this month.
Maldonado López covered local politics and had been previously attacked for her work, which led authorities to offer her local police protection and a panic button for emergencies, according to press organization Artículo 19.
At a daily press conference in 2019, Maldonado López told Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrado that she feared for her life and asked the government for protection. Maldonado López spoke out about a labor dispute with Jaime Bonilla, owner of media outlet PSN and who was later elected governor of Baja California. She had sued the company for unfairly firing her a decade earlier.
Just a few days before her murder, she won the lawsuit. She would have received 500,000 pesos, or USD$24,000.
A week earlier in the same city, photojournalist Margarito Martínez Esquivel was shot outside his home on January 17. He regularly covered crime and security issues in Tijuana for local and international publications. And earlier this month, journalist José Luis Gamboa Arenas was stabbed to death in Veracruz. He founded news website Inforegio and co-founded and edited news website La Noticia.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Mexico is the deadliest country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere. Three journalists were killed in Mexico because of their work in 2021 while CPJ is still determining if six other deaths were related to their work as reporters.
“The ongoing brutality against the journalists in this country is a direct consequence of the authorities’ unwillingness and inability to combat the festering impunity that fuels these killings,” Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico Representative, said. – Yvonne Marquez
As Study Hall prepares to publish the findings of our 2020 State of Freelance survey, we wanted to give our subscribers an exclusive peek into the forthcoming report. Over the next several weeks, we’ll publish snippets and musings from our ongoing research, and even pose some larger questions that the survey project is meant to illuminate. For this week’s dispatch, Development Director Evan Kleekamp looks at the respondents who reported less $100,000 in individual income and speaks with freelancers in this bracket about their decision to go freelance.
LIVING THE DREAM UNDER 100K
“Los Angeles journalist Oren Peleg says for most of the nine years he has been freelancing, he would make “anywhere between nothing to maybe $1,500 or $2,000 a month.”
“I lived in a super cheap studio for years. Even though I live in Los Angeles, I don’t have a car. Keeping my overhead cheap has allowed me to live on so little. But income instability has been a major source of anxiety. There have been periods of famine work-wise in which I’d wake up many nights in fits of panic thinking I was nearing homelessness and didn’t know what to do.”
Peleg says he has started taking on additional copywriting work during the pandemic, but does not see himself leaving journalism altogether. “My dream has always been to be a writer. I used to work outside the industry. I hated it. Respect to anyone who does that, truly. But I’ve done that before and I don’t care to go back.”
But Peleg does wonder how other writers manage. “I actually have no idea what others make,” he says. “Some of my friends are in PR, and they’ve told me that some writers make six figures and that blows my mind. I think those writers crank out dozens of stories a month every month, and I just do not even comprehend how that’s either possible or sustainable.”
EVERYTHING ELSE
+ In its continued investigation of the breakdown of G/O Media properties, Gawker asked “What Happened at the Root?” this week, revealing that 15 out of 16 full-time staffers have left since April and that G/O repeated its playbook of pressuring staff to make less reported, more clickable content (“I think [G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller] is really more comfortable with Black people who are doing entertainment stuff.”) and replacing a beloved editor-in-chief with a Spanfeller pick rather than promoting internally. The piece also reveals (although without G/O’s explicit confirmation) that The Root was “…the only profitable site [in G/O’s portfolio]. We were the site that was actually funding a lot of the other sites.”
In a Twitter thread, former Root writer Terrell Jermaine Starr goes long on the impact of the pre-G/O Root as well as the risks of staff jobs at corporate-owned sites for all journalists: “If they own it, they can destroy it. Never allow yourself to be emotionally committed to a job that you have no financial stake in.”
+ A new Nieman Lab report finds that while in 2017 about 10% of posted journalism job ads wanted applicants to be “passionate,” in 2022 a (very rough) estimate puts the appearance of the words “passion” or “passionate” at 53%. Could this be connected to the skyrocketing anecdotal data of burnout and trauma on the job, or the increasingly powerful workers’ rights movement gaining a foothold in media? Who’s to say!
+ What’s the salary of the CEO at Insider, which is currently running a series on salary transparency? Fun question!
+ In book publishing, a tragic accident at sea.
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