I am an example of one of those people who left the newspaper job (making less than $28k and looking at nothing better than the prospect of an annual 2% salary increase — or is that a 2% decrease, depending on inflation?) and now work for a large company doing internal web and print communications.

It’s unfortunate. I enjoyed many aspects of working at a newspaper. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that my future was so limited. I felt let down that I’d bought into the American belief that education promises a good life. Instead I ended up with a Master’s, a mountain of loans and no prospect of being able to afford even a modest lifestyle, as long as I worked in the core tradition of journalism. Well, my education and newspaper experience is giving me a good life, but not in the way I’d anticipated. (And for the record, by “good life,” I only meant earning $30-40k/yr at a newspaper, nothing grandiose.)

Second example: My wife, ex-photojournalist. She now is an art and Spanish teacher.

The story Pat shared about his girlfriend’s experience is a familiar one. And he’s right that anybody who has the skills that newspapers want, both old and new media skills, can get much better compensation in just about any field other than newspapers, especially starting out (the crappy hours and working on weekends, of course, would still be part of being in journalism, newspaper or not).

I was fortunate enough to start out at $30k as a designer/copy editor at a 50k paper back in 2000 and moved up to above $40k at a bigger paper within about 3 years. Honestly, I’ve never taken a newspaper job at a salary that I didn’t feel satisfied with (though I’ve been very lucky in that regard). The problem now is that if you move up far enough on the salary scale in newspapers, you become a target for the next round of job cuts. It’s a no-win situation.

Or technologists in general.

I was offered a reporting position when I was first looking for a job with a salary under $25,000. One of the reasons they liked me was because of my Web skills, and they wanted me to help improve their Web site. My Web skills are precisely why I didn’t take that job. That paper is continuing its slow ride into oblivion. How are papers like that supposed to turn things around?

With the salaries they offer, they can’t. Less than a year ago my girlfriend was making a little more than $30,000 in the New York market. With her student loans, she was barely getting by. She had no money to do anything other than pay her bills and quickly became burned out by journalism at a mid-sized daily.

She rarely had times to take breaks, routinely worked unpaid overtime and was rewarded with a raise that was less than inflation, despite getting a glowing review. The top raise that a journalist at her 50,000-circulation Gannett paper got was 3%.

Now she is making in the upper 40s doing marketing and PR for a university and much happier because of it. And she doesn’t have to work 4:30 p.m. – 12:30 a.m. anymore or lose most of her weekends.

I too am bullish on the future of journalism. I’m very bearish, however, on the future of newspapers.