Journo Salary Sharer: How much do social media editors make?
When you’re hunting for salary information, it can be especially hard if you’re eyeing a relatively new or unusual job title. In the past 5–10 years, more and more journalists are working in roles that involve social media, community engagement, audience development, or all of the above. Here’s a brief look at the salary responses from people in these kinds of “social journalism” jobs.
- Who’s included: Anyone who said they worked in “social media/audience engagement” or had a title that included “social.”
Who responded to the survey?
131 people in social media or engagement roles responded to the survey by Thursday. As always, just want to highlight for you that this is a small, self-reported, non-random survey, so these results aren’t statistically/scientifically meaningful, just interesting.
- Overwhelmingly, the people who responded in these roles were women in their 20s and early 30s.
- More than twice as many women as men responded (70% to 30%). While there are many excellent men who work in the field, too, it’s generally been dominated by women, so I don’t think this sample is overly skewed. (Social media work has been called a “pink ghetto”).
- And for age: More than four-fifths of all respondents are younger than 34 (The most common age bracket was 24–26, followed closely by 27–29).
- Just more than half work in large organizations (100+ editorial staff). The other half is evenly split between medium and small outlets.
- Almost 75% live in high-cost-of-living cities, while fewer than 10% are in low-cost areas (and the rest are somewhere in the middle).
A quick note on job titles
Of the 131 people in this category, there were 81 different job titles.
Reading through the list of titles looks like a grade school word problem where you had to figure out how many different two- and three-word combinations were possible using the following words: “social” “digital” “community” “audience” “editor” “director” “manager” “producer” “specialist” “analyst” and “coordinator.”
So, just for fun, my favorite developer/journalist (my husband, Justin Myers) built a random title generator for social journalist types:
It’s here: http://social.journalism.ninja/random-title-generator/
(Bummed Medium doesn’t let me embed things like this, if anyone knows a workaround let me know.)
So of the responses to the survey, the most common title was “social media editor,” so that’s how I’m going to refer to this whole group from this point on. (And FWIW, the 30 people with the specific title “social media editor” had the same median salary as the overall group.)
Anyway, back to the numbers:
What’s the range of salaries for social media editors?
The median salary for social media editors is $57,500, which is higher than we saw for reporters, copy editors, producers, and even a touch higher than editors. This could be a byproduct of having a higher percentage of responses come from high-cost-of-living areas and large organizations (though that may also just signal where these jobs exist).
How much does pay increase with experience?
These responses show the median salary for these jobs increasing from $48,000 in the first two years up to $63,500 by the fourth year.
Do people make less at small companies?
As we’ve seen with other positions, the range of salaries in a large organization is wider and higher (which makes sense, considering they likely have more management-level positions). It’s so pronounced here that the median salary in a large organization ($67K) is near the top of the range for salaries at a small organization (20 or fewer editorial employees).
Next week: Posts about designers (print and web) and photographers. Also, I start my crazy fall semester (I’m graduating from grad school in December), so apologies if posts or my replies are more delayed.
In the meantime, please still encourage your friends and colleagues to share their salaries: bit.ly/journosalary
Any other questions about social media editor 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.
