"An economic expansion that has lasted an unprecedented eight years.  A sharp drop in the unemployment rate that, at least for now, has all but put an end to two decades of falling real incomes. A quadrupling of stock prices since the beginning of the decade. A new technology that speeds the flow of information and boosts productivity. For journalists, this all adds up to the strongest job market in a long, long time. Meaning, for many of us, increasing pay and more jobs to choose from.

Media heavyweights like the Associated Press, Time Inc., and Gannett are hiring and, in some cases, at salaries that have increased substantially from the mid-1990s. Technology reporters, business reporters, and copy editors are in particularly high demand. The explosion of journalistic Web sites and magazines has created hundreds and hundreds of jobs over the last four years, a few paying more than $50,000 a year for beginners.

Indeed, new media is a driving force. By expanding the number of jobs, new media is beginning to change the supply and demand equation in both new and traditional media. And, the money that is lubricating the journalistic market is both the real kind, produced by profits in the business, and the "funny kind" that results from the great boom that has been lifting the Internet stocks.

Meanwhile, advertising is on the rise. As the economy steams along, shortages are appearing in traditional job slots, partly because of the ruthless cost cutting of the early 1990s.

There is no neat, unambiguous source of information about journalists' salaries or how they compare with pay in other professions. But the data that we do have say that over the past decade - and especially over the past three or four years - the increase in earnings of journalists has outstripped the increase in most other occupations, including the professions.

One place that the bracing news about salaries shows up is in the annual Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, which measures the median worker's pay in many occupations. For journalism, that median is keyed to "editors and reporters," and covers people who define themselves as being one or the other.
The BLS data shows that over the past ten years, the rise in salaries for editors and reporters has been 46 percent. That exceeds almost every other profession, including architects (41 percent), financial managers (35 percent), accountants and auditors (34 percent), and lawyers (32 percent). Journalists' wage increases have even beaten out those of computer specialists (40 percent).

New forces propelling the economy are carrying the newsroom in their wake. Journalism is benefitting from a kinetic mixture of money and technology.

The growing perception that news is now an ingredient of the Internet, has changed the calculation that goes into investment decisions. Established companies are willing to invest in online ventures in order to compete. Media companies are born and go up on the Web. Internet portals suddenly bet that an investment in news will eventually pay off; Netscape, recently bought by America Online, now perceives news as part of its basic service, as do other major Internet portals like Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite. Even outfits like broker Charles Schwab are starting financial news and information services and hiring journalists to run them.

The epicenter of the information revolution - high tech itself - has created one of the biggest beats and hottest job markets for journalism. Silicon Valley - growth engine of the '90s economy - has created a cadre of increasingly high-paid reporters.

Some melding of new media and traditional media is inevitable, and this will reverberate on the job and in the paycheck. An increasing number of journalists are already moving more easily among new journalism's fresh and various branches - online operations run by traditional media companies, editorial operations run by large high-tech companies, independent editorial Web sites. "Our graduates are being hired into a multi-tasked environment right now," says Northwestern's Peck.

The job market is buoyant now. But what about when the next recession arrives? "The fate of new media may depend on how long the economy remains as good as it is today," says Gene Roberts, the former New York Times managing editor who is now teaching at the University of Maryland."

 -- Anne Colamosca, "Pay for Journalists is Going Up", Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 1999; http://www.cjr.org/year/99/4/pay.asp.