WTF ?

On a gloomy February morning, journalist Eloise Hendy went into overdraft. She was frustrated – for over two years, she had been steadily picking up work as a freelance writer, but while waiting on several of her invoices to be paid, her landlord had increased her rent. Later that day she scrolled through Twitter, fnding a job advertisement for a Columnist Assistant role at the New York Times advertised with a salary of $75,000 (£62,000).

Hendy posted a screenshot of the job advert to Twitter with the caption: “Sob laugh in British”, racking up thousands of likes and kickstarting a heated discussion among journalists in the UK and across the pond. “I just moved back to the UK from NYC and can’t get over how bad wages are here,” one commenter wrote.

When Natasha Wynarczyk started out in journalism 11 years ago, her frst job at a women’s fashion magazine paid less than the London Living Wage. The exposure of entering the feld at a prestigious publication can’t make up for lost earnings, she says. “If you start on a low salary, there’s every likelihood you’re going to be constantly lowballed throughout your career when it comes to salaries.”

For freelancers, things aren’t looking any better. Recently, Wynarczyk saw a day of shift work at The Sun advertised for £120 – the same amount she received when she freelanced for them in 2017. According to archived rates published by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), Elle paid £375 for a 1000-word feature in 1998, the equivalent of £744 today. In 2020, a freelancer received £200 for a feature of the same length. In 2005, Esquire paid £400(£647 today) for a print feature, while in 2020 the highest published fee for a feature of similar length at the same publication was £300.

Editorial budgets have undoubtedly declined over the past decade, but in the aftermath of the pandemic and a looming recession, the sector has become even more fnancially challenged, causing several media businesses to cut jobs in 2022. At the

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same time, few outlets have adjusted their contributor fees with infation.

“The fees in journalism are right at the bottom of the pile,” says Thea de Gallier, a former music journalist turned full-time copywriter. Money wasn’t why she got into it, “but when you’re begging for scraps, getting 100 quid for a feature that might have taken a week to write feels so demoralising. With such a low pay rate and the fact that barely anyone pays on time, you feel like you’re doing work for absolutely nothing.” the Financial Times, who wished to remain anonymous. “We don’t have to reach a huge audience to be proftable – that’s a pretty unique position compared to most publications who have to put content behind a paywall.”

Inevitably, this increases journalism’s class divide, with recent fgures from the NCTJ confrming that people in the industry are almost twice as likely as the general population to come from advantaged backgrounds.

Last year, the Financial Times offered to relocate her to New York, where she was shocked to learn the salaries of some of her peers. “People here get money that I didn’t even know was possible for journalists to be paid. You would struggle to fnd a staff member at a US paper who is on less than $120,000.”

Wynarczyk, who represents the National Union of Journalists at Reach plc in London, says the company’s expansion into the US has revealed salaries that weren’t previously available for employees in the UK. “For example, a reporter’s salary was advertised for $70,000 (£57,764), which is not what it would be in the UK.”

In her nine-year journalism career, de Gallier worked her way up from specialist music magazines to eventually landing a job at the BBC, where she stayed for three years. “Meanwhile, some of my peers went straight into commercial copywriting, where 350 quid a day is the lowest anyone will even get out of bed for.”

One of the problems is the oversaturation of the digital publishing industry, says Michele Lavery, publisher of The Knowledge, a daily news round- up. “There’s more places for content, but people pay less to have it,” she says. Having worked in Fleet Street for over 30 years, she sees new opportunities for journalists to monetise their work in innovative ways, through direct creator-toaudience subscription models. The key to survival? Building a strong digital strategy.

“The FT has a unique and good position in the UK in the sense that our customers are really rich and our corporate subscriptions are high,” says a New York-based editor at

In August, Reach employees went on strike to demand higher wages to cope with the rising cost of living. “There were people on like £15,000 or £16,000 who were using food banks, and we managed to get some of them pay rises of up to 44 per cent,” says Wynarczyk.

While the gap could’ve been closed after the industrial action last autumn, Wynarczyk thinks it’s probably because “there’s a high chance female journalists were already more likely to be the lowest-paid”.

Low pay is also not conducive to producing high-quality work that readers are willing to pay for. “If you start cutting journalists’ pay and amalgamating more things into their role, they’re not going to have time to do hard-hitting investigations,” says Wynarczyk.

She believes work-to-rule, as an industrial action, could be particularly effective, where people are expected to work on stories out of hours and break news that might happen later in the day.

“You’re doing an important, highly- skilled job. It’s a public service and there is money in it,” says the FT staffer. “The CEO is a millionaire! When you start to think about it that way, it’s like, why shouldn’t journalists be paid more?” hen Ateh Jewel began her journalism career in 2001, there were fve shades of foundation. “And the darkest colour was Beyonce. I would say, ‘Please can I write about curls and coils and Afro textured hair?’ and they’d say, ‘No, it’s not luxurious, it’s not aspirational.’ People would openly say, ‘Black doesn’t sell.’ Just racist, in your face nonsense.”