[sportslife]

It doesn't pay well enough now.

30 years ago a BSc could accept a slightly lesser salary for more wide social-cache and more excitement working on magazine features and still afford a nice home in a nice neighborhood. It was dollar-a-word work at the time. Expenses too if you were good.

Pick any magazine-story-becomes-romance from the 80s, 90s, 00s (e.g. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) to relive the glory days.

Now, no science grad could make that choice.

[ghaff]

Yeah. I do occasional contract work these days and $1 to $1.50 a word for stuff I'm not being paid for anyway by my day job is OK--and pretty much my floor. Ends up being a couple hundred dollars per hour.

But that's really not a random online pub rate.

Journalism was pretty much never a super high-paying profession for most but, as you say, it could be a solid middle-class job which it mostly isn't today absent other or related income sources (which tend to be difficult given ethics rules). And working for the NYT, WSJ, Time, or Newsweek certainly had a cachet as an often Ivy League grad.