SABEW conducting annual survey of business journalism salaries

The Society of American Business Editors and Writers’ third annual confidential survey of business journalists throughout the country aims to determine what is happening to the pay for business reporters and editors in various positions.

CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HTW2XZC

The compensation information you provide for the salary survey will remain strictly confidential. None of the information provided by any business journalist will be available to anyone else.

The results of the survey will be made available to all SABEW members by the end of September, and the data will be updated annually to determine whether pay for business journalists is rising or falling, by how much, and what positions are seeing the biggest changes in compensation.

To do that, we need your help. Please click on the link above. Answering the questions will take less than a minute, but will provide valuable data for business journalists such as yourselves. The deadline to take this 60-second survey is Friday, Aug. 12. Please take a minute (literally) to help us compile this valuable information.

“We saw a slight uptick in pay from the 2011 survey, so we’re interested in seeing whether that has continued this year,” said Jill Jorden Spitz, SABEW’s president and an assistant managing editor of the Arizona Daily Star. “We hope this data will become useful for our members who want to compare their pay to others in the industry and who want to see where they stand.”

The 2011 informal survey, which received nearly 320 responses, discovered that slightly more than half of those who responded said that their salaries had increased during the past year, while less than 10 percent said that their salary had decreased. Nearly 40 percent said there was no change to their salary in the past 12 months.

SABEW, which has its headquarters at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, asks business journalists for such information annually to determine how compensation and other demographics among them change.

The survey results will be analyzed by SABEW’s research director Chris Roush, a journalism professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. The results will be broken out among geographic areas in the country, as well as by position, by length of time on a job, and by experience.

For questions, about the survey, e-mail Roush at croush@email.unc.edu.