Journo Salary Sharer: How much do photojournalists make?
Oof. That was my reaction while crunching the numbers about how much photojournalists make (based on responses to Journo Salary Sharer). It’s not pretty. But let’s dig in.
Who’s included: Anyone with “photo” in their title or who selected “Photo” as their area of experience.
Who responded to the survey:
- 138 photojournalists, from part-time freelance photographers and interns on up to photo directors at large news organizations.
- Around equal numbers of people from small, medium and large organizations. Also, 13 freelancers responded.
- Slightly more people from high-cost-of-living cities (41%) than from medium (28%) or low-cost areas (32%).
- More men than women: 58% of the responses came from men.
- Mostly young photojournalists in their 20s (56%) and 30s (30%).
Here’s your regular reminder that this isn’t a scientific study. It’s a self-reported, non-random sample, so while it’s interesting and hopefully useful, it’s not technically statistically representative of the industry.
What’s the range of photojournalist salaries?
Another way to look at the responses:
How does pay increase with experience?
The responses to the survey suggest that median salary for early career photojournalists ($30K) is lower than it is for reporters ($38K), copy editors ($34K), print designers ($38K), and web producers ($43K). Some salaries went so low, I even had to rearrange where I put the label in the graphic for early career journalists (0 to 4 years of experience).
However, as we’ve seen with the other jobs, salaries do tend to increase by about $10K within the first 5 to 10 years in the field.
Now let’s look at a few other factors:
If you live in a more expensive city, you’ll probably have a higher salary, but not necessarily — you can see from these ranges that some people in high-cost-of-living areas are still making less than the median in low-cost-of-living areas.
(Number of responses per category: Low: 44 | Medium: 38 | High: 56)
Working at a larger organization looks like it opens up the possibility of higher salaries, but large organizations also tend to be in more expensive cities, so those two factors could be interplaying. Of the 20 highest salaries that photojournalists shared, 15 were from people at a large organization, in a high-cost city, or both.
(Number of responses per category: Small: 39 | Medium: 42 | Large: 44 | Freelance: 13)
What about different job titles?
There was no difference between respondents with title simply of “photographer” or “photojournalist” — both had a median salary around $33K.
Photo editors made almost double that — the median salary was $60K for the 26 photo editors who took the survey.
Any other questions about photojournalist salaries, or anything else related to this series? Find me on Twitter (@JuliaJRH) or email (Julia.Haslanger@journalism.cuny.edu).
For more about the limitations of this survey data and my process in handling it, see my earlier post.
Previous posts about Journo Salary Sharer:
- How it all started: Let’s talk about journalism salaries (Aug. 7, 2015)
- Update on Journo Salary Sharer — 2,500 responses! (Aug. 14, 2015)
- Job-specific posts: Reporters | Editors | Web producers | Copy editors | Social media editors | Designers
