The Real World Journalism – Media – Tech – Online Job Title, Responsibility & Salary Survey – Version 2.0

Got 2 minutes and don’t feel like reading all this mumbo jumbo?  Please take our totally anonymous, 10-question job title, responsibility and salary survey to help us define job standards for our industry.

A couple years ago, I pulled together an online survey from folks working in the journalism and tech fields to try and figure out what all the different job titles peppered with buzzwords really mean: Interactive reporters. Web editors. Multimedia journalists. Website directors. Content strategists. Assistant deputy managing producers. It’s not like we’re plumbers where we can go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupation Outlook Handbook and look up any of these modern online media jobs to get real, accurate information that applies to our industry and skill sets.  Job titles, responsibilities and pay rates are really not uniform in the industry and through the original survey we received a little clarity. Feedback was fantastic and the results were very popular for some time and including getting referenced by several professors and career service departments as a general (non-scientific) guide for understanding.

It’s been a while since that original survey and over the past couple months I’ve had several people each independently ask me to do the survey again, so I’m kicking it off to get another glimpse of what job titles really mean in the online media and technology industries.

Juxtaposing the previous results to this survey should provide for some enlightening perspective on the profession. There’s still a huge need for more clarity, as most job responsibilities still vary vastly from organization to organization — especially in our layoff-filled industry where jobs are constantly juggling more and more. There’s also new specialties in the profession that didn’t really exist in the previous survey — “social media” wasn’t really a full time job, multimedia was just cracking out of the egg and mobile hadn’t blossomed at all. Beyond that, many of those who were once in the industry at traditional media organizations have scattered and taken their unique skill sets to new positions, in new non-traditional media organizations that value them. We’re looking for all types in this survey — from folks working at traditional mainstream organizations to independent bloggers, media startups, database managers, SEO experts, usability experts, multimedia producers at commercial agencies — anyone related to the increasingly blurred field of online media/content production.

So please take two minutes to fill out this completely anonymous 10-question survey. Also if you could share this with your colleagues in/out/around the media industry (especially if they work in the media, but at non-traditional organizations), that would be excellent. It will help us all get a better grip on how our jobs are structured collectively, what technologies and responsibilities are really needed for various positions (and not just the laundry list of every program and programming language known to the recruiter) and (perhaps most importantly) what we all are/should/could be making for our skills.

I’ll keep the survey open for about two weeks or until we get comparable responses to the previous survey and then post some analysis on the results afterwards.

To fill out the survey, please follow this link or just fill it out below: