Entry Level Pay

I'm telling this story not to brag, but to caution against turning down "foot-in-your-door" wages.

When I got my first job in the business -- and this is a little complicated -- it was for a new paper that didn't exactly exist yet. In the meantime, I was put in one of the chain's bureaus and given a salary of $15K. If I didn't fuck up, and I was moved to the new paper when it started, I'd be given a raise then.

I was so happy to luck into a job that I didn't deserve, I didn't even whisper a complaint when I began working at the new paper and my salary didn't increase.

That was in October, 1998. February, 1999, I still hadn't been given a raise.

I was pretty broke... Lived in Toronto in a tenement with two buddies; no car; split the cable and phone bills; everything was pretty close to the bone. But looking back, I was pretty happy back then.

ANYWAY, I'm covering a fight in Montreal. I stay up all night writing a 2,000 word story. One of the copy editors, a really good guy, edits a mistake into my copy, turning a sentence into a sentence fragment. I read this on the train back from Montreal, call my boss, and shit a brick.

He tells me I'm being a little ungrateful, seeing where I'm at, at my age, and having just been paid to write a big story for a national newspaper.

"Do you know what I'm being paid for that privilege?" I asked.

He did not. I told him. He got off the phone.

By the time I got to Toronto, I was making $60K a year. I felt like a fucking millionaire -- like, I would stuff money down the pants of random strangers on the sidewalk.

But had I sniffed at $15K, I wouldn't have had any of that.

So, um, yeah.

 

guy - you're probably better moving to Manhattan, getting some temp job, and hustling nights covering preps for the NY papers. At least you'll be enjoying life in your 20s, which is when you should be living it up.

If you're a hustler, you can make it happen ...

 

True, but would you want to do what he does?

 

Great looking woman I used to work with was the auto ad rep. She made more cash than the editor.

 

I'm seriously thinking about it.

 

Hell, any of us on here could do a better job selling ads than most ad departments.

 

I really wouldn't mind taking over a circulation department. Most of them suck ass. I really believe that's why newspapers lose so many readers. People always tell me they canceled because they never got the paper ... only once did someone I know actually cancel because of something I wrote.

It's bad enough you have to rely on contract workers (paper boy) to deliver the damn thing, at least make sure you have staff there on the weekends ready to get in a car and hand deliver it to someone who didn't get it. So much of this business is customer service.

 

Or if they didn't get their TV guide ... A TV Guide insert that doesn't get into some papers makes for a long Sunday when you only have a general line.

 

Rent a one bedroom where I live is $800 a month.

You need 35K to survive or 2K - 2200 a month take home.

 

What about not only working for shit wages, but working at a place where the publisher forbids employees from taking second jobs, because "it would look bad for the paper -- like we don't pay our employees enough" ?

I worked at two or three joints like that -- a couple where the publisher expressly forbid it, and another where they made sure you were on 24-hour call, and made a habit of beeping you at any hour of the day or night, making it virtually impossible to have any other kind of job.

Oh yeah, one of these was the place where Mr. Publisher told his news editor -- the No. 2 guy in an 8-person newsroom, making about $17,500 (this was 20 years ago now) -- who was eligible for food stamps since he had a dependent wife and daughter, that he ought to only use his food stamps in the dark of night, at the 24-hour market after getting out of work, or in the town where he lived 30 miles away, "because it makes the paper look bad."

 

What other job? Freelance? Delivering pizzas?

On the news side, I've only known those types of jobs where I'm always on call.

 

Any other job. Freelancing -- writing for any other publication anywhere in the world -- was expressly forbidden as well.

The case in point, a couple times one of the reporters would get jobs clerking at the local convenience store or gas station. As soon as word reached Mr. Publisher, he would call the reporter in, and say, "In 30 seconds, you are resigning from one of your jobs. It's up to you which one it is."

At the other place, where moonlighting was not specificially forbidden, sometimes people would get convenience-store or fast-food jobs on the morning shift, before coming in to work at the paper at 5 p.m. The publisher would make sure to beep them several times during the morning (when other people were already in the office) to do bullshit like type briefs, etc etc. Just an indirect way of making sure that if you had another job, you'd either get fired or have to quit it.