Yeah, she’ll probably make $30K to $60K there, depending on which station and whether she’s going to be a reporter or an anchor. She’s jumping to market 26, so that’s a big jump.
She was in West Virginia for two years, I think, then moved to Buffalo (market #53) and got a job making like $30-35K there. She did about two years there and was looking for her next job, but didn’t find anything appealing and had enough of it and went back to school for her MBA and got out of the industry.
The combination of the lack of pay and the way you get treated by both bosses and viewers was too much for her to be able to enjoy. You’re expected to basically work 60+ hours a week, back in the day you used to get a cameraperson with you, but around the time we graduated (2008), they started laying off camera people and making reporters shoot their own video as a “one man band.”
So the job wasn’t as physically demanding before, but then you had to lug around a big camera and tripod, shoot with it on your shoulder potentially for long stretches of time (which is uncomfortable for some, painful for others), and do a bunch of work that is not want people who went into reporting were trying to do.
Then she’d get viewers calling/writing/emailing and ripping her to shreds for not covering their kids’ high school game. Like, sorry, everyone plays on Friday night. She’d go to a few games in a night to try to get video, but it’s just impossible to cover them all. And I’m not talking about polite complaints like “Hey would you please come cover my kid’s school, we’re upset that you’re not!” Like angry, profane, and sexist: “Hey you stupid bitch why don’t you ever come to XYZ High School games, fuck you!!!”
Anyway yeah I have a ton of sympathy for people working in the media at the lower levels. One of the reasons that most of the network/national people come from money and have very economically conservative views informing their coverage is that they’re the ones who can afford to make $18K and then $35K and then $45K and then $60K and not have it impact their lifestyle one bit thanks to the trust fund…
Right, basically everybody working at NYT has the same resume:
Exeter/Georgetown Prep/Harvard Westlake > Ivy or Ivy-adjacent school > unpaid internship > masters in journalism from Columbia > first job paying $40k in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Yea one of my wife’s friends was a local reporter in Dallas. Your main local reporter make ok money but the reporters they send out to do spots make peanuts. You really have to move up or move out because you’re traveling everywhere all the time and if you’re a morning reporter you have no life because you’re getting up at 2 AM to cover stuff for the 6 AM crowd.
He left reportering for a higher paying job with less stress … teaching high school
Yeah and that’s in Dallas, which is a top 5 market I think. It might be #6, but whatever, it’s a big one, so the pay should be towards the higher end of the scale, and it’s still pretty bad.
The burrito guy tweeted about his outrage at Chipotle’s prices so it seems like they just scroll through social media and reach out to people to get quotes.
Hey maybe they’re finally going to warn people that these lunatics are going to try it again, and that the people who marched on 1/6 and didn’t go in might be radicalized by next time!
To many of those who attended the Trump rally but who never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.
~Nobody watches the briefings live. They’re just trying to get a sound byte or exchange to run on a news show in prime time.
None of them end up looking stupid on their own network, they don’t care if MSNBC dunks on them (or Fox in the inverse), but if she fumbles the answer, they win. Huge freeroll for them.
