During the COVID-19 Pandemic, media was one of the most precarious industries in terms of job security. Other industries made a conscious effort to introduce ‘work from home’ and other alternatives to help employees. However, the media industry witnessed heavy lay-offs, salary cuts and leave without pay for employees. Even top firms like Times Group, the Indian Express Group, Hindustan Times Media Limited, Business Standard Limited and the Quintillion Media Private Limited that runs The Quint were hut by the crisis.
But the trouble for the media employees isn’t restricted to the Pandemic. And the concept of internships too works to the disadvantage of journalists.
Indian media works on a highly capitalist model
Entry into the media world is tough for any journalist. The industry doesn’t pay well. A beginner starts with around Rs. 15,000 per month.
The salaries can go as high as Rs. 10 lakh per annum for an experienced journalist but the average pay of a journalist in India is around Rs. 4 lakh per annum, that is, less than Rs. 35,000 a month. On the contrary, a journalist in the US earns between $23,000 and $98,000 per annum.
Things get worse at core left-wing media platforms, where the employees are the ones required to carry the burden of a humble foot soldier of the leftist ideology.
According to an insider, the left-leaning media portals generally feed on their leftist ideology. Whenever a journalist of such portal demands a salary, the left-media portals start talking about their capitalist principles.
Then come the freelancing journalists, also known as stringers. These journalists are generally paid on per story basis. If someday they do not get a story or the media organisation thinks that the story is not news worthy, its simple, they will not be paid for the day.
They have to live frugally with abysmally low salaries for their work while the top management takes away most of the money generated in the business.
Top media leadership takes the lion’s share
Now, the pay disparity is too great. Media firms don’t pay less because they don’t have money. In a country with crores of readers and viewers, media firms do earn a lot.
Most of the big media firms are top-heavy. The owners and those holding top positions take away the lion’s share. Their monthly income runs into crores and the lower-level employees get what they want. Since the industry standards are such, fresher journalists don’t have a choice but to start with low pay scales.
How journalism graduates get harassed in name of internships
If you are thinking that journalism jobs pay less but are easygoing, you are wrong. They do carry a lot of work pressure. Reporters have to travel a lot to cover ‘breaking news’ and even those working at media offices have the burden of delivering quality content with a tight schedule.
And even then, some of the journalism graduates are not recruited regularly. There is this concept of internships in which employees are hired by media firms temporarily. They work like any other regular employee but are paid as interns.
The interns join any organisation to learn the ropes. But in big media firms, the interns turn out to be the fillers for the resource crunch.
The salary of an intern can be around Rs. 6,000/- per month in a top media organisation. It goes down even further for medium and small scale firms. Hence, big media enterprises can save a lot of money because interns are paid less than half of what a regular employee will have to be paid. And they can still take as much work out of an intern as an employee.
Indian journalism is therefore one of the most unequal, unfair industries as far as treatment of the employees is concerned. And to make it worse, it even carries a tradition of internships that effectively amount to harassment of journalist grads.
