The Daily Citizen (Searcy, Ark.)

While I don't doubt your sincerity, that's the kind of attitude that creates the climate in which a newspaper can advertise a job for $15k a year without any apparent sense of shame.

 

I think her point was that there are better paying gigs out there for kids coming straight out of college. Unless I was a student at Harding, there is no way I'd settle for this. If you don't think you're better than that, you really shouldn't be in journalism. No one deserves to work for less than fastfood will pay.

 

Before long, we'll be lovers. I can feel it.

 

The most important part of sportschick's argument is the perspective she presented in terms of today's economy. A starting salary of $15-20,000 at a small paper where you can cut your teeth and then move up was easier to live on 10 or 15 years ago. Heck, my first daily job paid $7 an hour -- but that was in 1995 when you could still get a gallon of regular unleaded for as low as $1 per gallon.

To ask someone to try and live on that salary as a full-time sports writer today is absurd, and I don't care what part of the country it's in. A four-year college degree and even a spec of writing talent warrants better than that.

Look, we all know the odds of us getting rich in this business are about as good as the odds of winning the lottery, but what we do is not easy and not everyone can do it. And the only way we can impact the pay scale is by sending a message to some of these publishers and owners that the disparity in pay cannot continue, and turning down jobs offering such ridiculously low salaries like this one is where we can start.

 

Q: What do you call a sophisticated Arkansas journalist?

A: A Texas journalist.

Paxton and all its Paxlets can suck my Schwanz.

 

That's not true about Conway. I know for a fact that the sports editor was also having to work part-time at another position. The Log Cabin also wanted a person to take a huge pay cut (approximately $8,000 per year) just to work there, and he had to turn it down. The Log Cabin is pretty cheap as well.

 

I'm fascinated that such a shitty job in Searcy, Arkansas would get so much discussion on here.

 

I think it's gone from being a discussion of the actual job to a rant about slave wages.

And method, spup knows the Log Cabin Democrat. Trust me on this one.

 

So what should be the going entry rate of pay?

 

Don't expect more than $10/hr.

 

Not sure if anyone wants this thread revived, but here's my $.02.

My first two jobs, about 5 years ago (mid- and late-2002) each paid $10/hour. That's $20,800 a year. It worked because of where I lived, particularly at the first job.

My next full-time job paid $11 an hour. It was not enough. I worked a part-time job, about 12-15 hours a week, at somewhere around $8 an hour.

When I moved there, I rented a one-bedroom apartment for $536 a month. It wasn't the cheapest in the area, but it also wasn't particularly high-quality. There were cheaper, but they were not in places you or I would want to live. In the time since I left that apartment (mid-2005), the rate they advertise has gone up to $599 a month. In addition, when I left, they wanted to force me to have renter's insurance as a condition of living there. Ignoring that, that's an increase of $63 a month in something like two years. That's a shade under 12 percent, or $756 a year.

I'm gonna get a little complicated now. Forgive me. If we assume that one shouldn't pay more than 30 percent of one's income to rent, that means to account for the difference, that means your salary would have to rise by more than $2,500 to cover it. ($756/.3)

What am I saying? In most parts of the country, it is significantly more expensive to live than it used to be. Since 2002, the price of gas, for example, has more than doubled. Most mileage rates haven't. When I started out, mileage was a nice bonus. I didn't spend nearly as much as I got back in gas. Now, I don't drive for work, but it wouldn't go nearly as far.

Food has gotten more expensive. Overall car insurance rates have increased. Movie ticket and baseball ticket prices have increased. It's been happening for decades, of course, but now more than ever, the wage structure simply doesn't keep pace. The $11/hour gig still pays people that same rate when they start, regardless of experience. In fact, it doesn't even pay that much. It pays a few pennies less.

I don't expect to be able to eat caviar every night and sip champagne off the breasts of strippers. But I do think it's reasonable to expect that if I make sound financial decisions (and, yes, many young people don't), that with a college degree, I should be able to command a salary that at the very least allows me to pay for an apartment, buy halfway-decent food (if I watch for sales) and actually afford to have some kind of quality of life.

But here's what they'll tell you: They'll tell you to look at the federal wage averages, and they'll show you how they've continually gone up. And they won't tell you why: Because things like health insurance premiums and 401(k) matching count as part of your income. And because health insurance continues to skyrocket, they continue to pay more, even as they shift more of the burden onto you.

Right, I'm done. Sorry to have rambled so.

 

Less than 10 years ago in Arkansas, I made under $10/hr. and owned a fairly nice 3-BR house. Not saying it can be done today, just sayin'.