<p>What is the average salary range for an established journalist?(Newspaper, magazine, or radio.)</p>
<p>i think the real question is, “what does it take to become an established journalist?”</p>
<p>theres no answer to that question. someone at the NYT will make a different amount than someone at the WSJ. depends on what level, what your definition of “established” is, how long you’ve been there, etc.</p>
<p>I assume you mean you want a general sense of what a person could expect to make after settling into a career as a journalist.</p>
<p>The salary range of journalists is immense. The range is a function of ability, ambition, and a lot of plain luck. In general, even though a few people do fabulously well, no one goes into journalism for the money. No one.</p>
<p>Many more or less established print journalists are freelancers: they write stories and try to sell them to magazines. This can be fun, but it’s a tough life and financially very precarious. It’s barely manageable (actually unmanageable) for most people beyond their twenties. You’re self-employed; think of the health insurance alone. Making a living this way is very iffy. A few people succeed at it. Most do it for awhile hoping to catch on as a reporter or staff writer somewhere. </p>
<p>As for print journalists who ARE employed by newspapers and magazines, most do not work for the New York Times or Newsweek. Most do not even work for news organizations as big as the Tulsa World (a pretty good paper) or Sports Afield. No, most are working for the thousands of papers in the class of, say, the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram or the Huntington Beach Independent. Or they are working for magazines like American Agent and Broker or Pallet Enterprise (the “trade magazine for the sawmill, pallet, and wood processing industries”). There are thousands of such.</p>
<p>Are you getting the idea? Most established working print journalists make salaries in the neighborhood of $35,000-$50,000 per year. Some make more, some make less, depending on where they are, but this is pretty typical in the country at large. An atrocious salary for a college-trained professional if you’re used to the high life in an urban center, but it’s possible to have a good and happy life, especially in a two-income family, on such a salary in a place like Tulsa or Eau Claire. What makes it worthwhile is that you’re doing what you like to do. You’re being paid to write about the world around you. Or a few aspects of it, anyway.</p>
<p>Never underestimate the value of a happy life. Personally, I’d take $35,000 as a reporter for a second-tier newspaper in a pleasant city any day over $135,000 and the hellishness and mindlessness of a precarious career as an execute for a pizza franchiser or in some hideous advertising agency or start-up cosmetics firm.</p>
<p>Print journalists who hit the big time, who work their way up to writing for the big newspapers and magazines, or who rise to editor positions with medium to large news organizations, make more money than the range I’ve given above, but not anything like the salaries of executives. The exceptions mainly are those who slog and luck their way into producing a best-selling book and/or become bona fide celebrity journalists for a major outlet in a major market, or on the national scene. Even the celebrities did not go into it for the money, however. They did not expect when starting out ever to be very well paid.</p>
<p>As for broadcast journalists, the story is more or less the same. Make it to the TV news on the CBS affiliate in Boston or Chicago, and financially you are more than fine. But most broadcast journalists are doing radio in Tallahassee or TV in Laramie and won’t go any further up than that. They do it because they like it.</p>
<p>There’s more burn-out in broadcast than in print. Especially there’s burn-out in television. And of course getting older, which will happen even to you, is never much help to a television career, especially for women, even now.</p>
<p>Finally, since you’ll wonder, I am not a journalist, but my spouse is. I’m here on CC because our daughter is doing what I assume you are: trying to figure out colleges and the rest of her life.</p>