6/17/2023 0 Comments Freelance travel writer salary![]() ![]() Data from the ONS is only collected from organisations with over 250 employees, so the data I’m citing is not representative of freelance journalists. It’s distressing reading, but the even broader problem lies in the fact that I have absolutely no idea how accurate these figures are. ![]() In even starker terms, for women to find income parity with men in the industry, we would need to work 40.5 additional days per year. ![]() Let’s put that into perspective: for every £1 a male journalist earns, their female colleague will make just 89 pence. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has identified that an 11.1% pay gap exists between female and male journalists. On today, International Women’s Day, this choice to avoid disclosing rates is even more pernicious. Job posting after job posting fails to divulge salaries: this Deputy Travel Editor role at the i offers a stunningly vague “competitive with great benefits” in lieu of cold, hard figures, while in this job as Features Writer at you can expect a “competitive salary dependent on experience, plus a discretionary performance-based bonus scheme and excellent benefits,” whatever that might actually entail. It’s not just freelancers who don’t have much of a clue what they can hope to be paid when they invest energy and brainpower into pitching a new publication, though it’s nigh-on impossible to know what you can expect to earn from an in-house job in the travel media. Want to know what travel writers earn? Read our financial transparency series from January 2022 Last week we shared a bumper list of contributor guidelines from some of the biggest titles in travel media but even some of the companies who have taken this very step to make their commissioning processes more transparent continue the foggy practice of not disclosing rates. When Lottie and I started this newsletter, our main aim was to demystify the travel media and no part of this industry needs demystifying more than pay. But the tweet served a wider purpose, spawning article after article celebrating Walker’s transparency and how crucial and powerful rate sharing is for the collective good of writers across the industry. Across the UK, jaws collectively dropped as we learned it was possible to earn $107,000 dollars (around £82,000) as a travel journalist. Being reminded that you can make bank in this industry was something I suspect most of us needed to hear after a lean few years. ![]()
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