Wow, I would have never guessed there would be this many archeologists and not even a single journalist. I'll bite though.
I spent most of my twenties writing for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. I graduated in 2003 with a bachelors degree in English, bummed around for a while and then took a job as an administrative assistant with Dow Jones, the parent of Newswires and the Journal. Starting pay was exactly $36,000 out of Washington, DC.
A year plus later, I moved into an entry level reporting role digging up news from SEC filings about public companies. Those jobs usually went to graduating college seniors who had previously interned with the company and paid somewhere in the $39,000 range. I graduated to reporter pretty soon after and made a little more than $50,000. Later I took another promotion to become an editor in the New York office and got another pay bump to the $65,000 or so. When I quit I was at $70,000 with the prospect of 2-3% annual raises.
I know my salary experience was a lot better than most of my peers. Many of my colleagues (or their parents) had shelled out the cash for a masters in journalism from somewhere fancy-sounding like Columbia or Stanford.
Working for a flagship company like the WSJ or the NYT will have fetch a better salary and job security prospects but they still aren't much to write home about. I was laid off once and was fortunate enough to find another job (a promotion, to boot!). By the time I was plotting my exit from the industry, rumors were again swirling about another round of layoffs and indeed a few months I left the executioner's blade fell again. (I had been hoping it would coincide with me getting out of the industry so I could volunteer for a buyout and leave with an extra nice goodbye, but alas.)
It's a tough business all around. I had a friend working as the business editor at a regional daily paper who had three reporters working under her. Her salary was $10 an hour. I felt like there was no room for substantial salary growth or advancement and I was one of the lucky ones to be working for a major media player and making a living wage in NYC. I even thought my salary worked against me a couple of different times looking for other opportunities. Companies would want to hire cheap recent grads who could do the job 75% as well as me for 50% of the money.
It was a lot of fun, though. I got to meet a ton of amazing people and put my heart into a couple of different projects and stories. And yes, despite the low pay and other complaints I've lodged here, working for the WSJ is a dream job for lots of people, me included at one time. If I had been connected with the right roles and possibilities to do the kind of work I wanted to do, it is likely I would still be there.