Posted on 08/05/2010 12:32:26 PM PDT by GOPGuide
CHICAGO The median salary paid a new graduate of a journalism and mass communications remained at $30,000 for the fourth consecutive year, but those jobs are now scarcer than they’ve been for j-school grads since 1987.
At daily newspapers, the median starting salary was $27,000, and at weeklies, new grads were paid a median salary of $25,000.
That’s according to the Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates conducted since 1987 by Lee D.. Becker director of the University of Georgia’s James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research at the University of Georgia.
New grads starting in union jobs made more than their non-union counterparts – but the gap has narrowed considerably. In 2008, for instance, union jobs started at a median of $34,400 while non-union jobs paid a median $30,000.
In 2009, non-union jobs were stuck at $30,000, but the union job pay declined to $30,700.
Only 46.2% of the bachelor’s degree recipients had a job on Oct. 31, 2009, which was more than 10 percentage points fewer than a year earlier, the survey found. About a quarter were working part-time, and another quarter were unemployed.
Racial and ethnic minority journalism graduates had a particularly difficult time finding a job, the survey found. Their full-time employment rate dropped 13.5 percentage points from the year-ago survey.
And the gap between the percentage of minority and non-minority graduates in terms of full-time employment was 15.3 points – the widest-yawning gap since 1987.
There was some good news/bad news results in the salary survey. On the one hand, the median salary was unchanged, while the average starting salary offer to all college graduates declined 1.9% from the year before, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) reported last September.
On the other hand, that average salary at $48,663 was far higher than for cub journalists. And the average graduate with a liberal arts bachelor’s degree also did better than j-school grads, with an offer of $36,624.
The graduate survey produced one bit of good news, according to Dr. Lee B. Becker, director of the survey. Graduates reporting on their job searches in the late spring of 2010 were much more likely to have found a full-time job than were graduates reporting at the end of 2009.
The full report, available here and written by Becker and fellow researchers Dr. Tudor Vlad, Paris Desnoes and Devora Olin, was released today at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Denver.
Actually, the core “motivation” of liberalism, and being a liberal, is to feel good, if not superior, about yourself.
What is it - 3 semesters per year? I did summer semesters all the time so I lost track.
Tons of Saudi money and Obama money stolen from tax payers to hire some to spew the party line.
Hm, going to be hard for them to pay off their student loans when all their potential employers are bleeding circulation and revenue left and right, right abb? :)
Furthermore, what they do (tell who, what, when, where, why and how) can be done by most anyone who can string a sentence together. Most never had the tools with which to work. With the internet, lots do now.
The “news monopoly” was never a monopoly of content or skill. It was a monopoly of distribution.
I refuse to pay back my student loans. I want free money instead. Everyone with kids gets welfare. Corporations and states get bailouts. It’s not just communications majors, it’s ALL majors. They punish people for doing the right thing: going to school and trying to get a job.
That's for the correspondence courses. Isn't Columbia something like 30K a YEAR? Hahaha.
Drudge is a reporter. He rakes in $12 million a year. That's how hungry the market is for news. Not JOURNALISM. NEWS.
Even basic sorts of things tend to evade their grasp. Put it this way: I'm pretty certain that the Peter Principle applies to people in my line of work, especially those one sees on the air.
(It does seem sort of ironic I guess that the would-be candidate for the GOP nomination in 2012 has a degree in Journalism.)
Not one liberal I have ever seen has reject materialism.
Well DUH!! After all, how RARE are 21 year old, brainless leftists??!!
My wife and I had to teach our daughter how to reconcile her checkbook. HS & college taught her nothing about that. A lot of people think that as long as you have checks left, you have money in the bank.
As fresh journalism graduates, they should then write it 100 times from the safety of their Mom’s basement before they have to say it to a valued customer. “Sir would you like fries with that?”
When I grow up, I want to be a journalism graduate. LOL!
As a j-school graduate, I can tell you that it’s always been a poor-paying profession until you got near the top. If you happen to be a tv news anchor in a large city or national network, it can be a well-paying gig but the grunts get paid a pittance which is part of the reason the media is staffed largely by ideology-driven zealots as opposed to objective reporters.
Those who aren’t in it for the goal of spreading an ideology left for greener pastures a long time ago.
“I can tell you that it’s always been a poor-paying profession until you got near the top.”
The guys at “the top” like NYTimes and WaPo reporters are also being culled laid off left and right.
Btw, do you know when (if they haven’t done so already) the top propaganda outlets like the NYTimes are going to start cutting ad rates because of steep circulation declines.
Even liberal Marketing agencies (which is almost all of them) aren’t going to pay top dollar to the NYTimes if fewer eyeballs are reading the NYTimes print edition.
$30,000 USD represents the top 7% of earners globally.
WANNA TAX THE RICH NOW?
If I owned a newspaper, my first policy would be that NO JOURNALISM MAJORS NEED APPLY.
a new graduate of a journalism and mass communicationsWow, they give degrees in partisan shilling?
They should go into technical writing if they want to get paid.
Shhh! Don't tell them. My daughter was a writer and editor for magazines. She saw the writing on the wall 5 years ago and went into technical writing. She's doing quite well now, highly paid, very busy and has too much work. The magazine she worked for went bust this year. She was an English major and wanted to be a journalist since she was 14. Glad she's not one now.
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