The freedom gap: what pay and class reveal about the future of journalism

François Nel speaking at our Newsrewired conference in May 2024

Credit: Mousetrap Media / Frank Noon

Every May 3, we mark World Press Freedom Day — a date that rightly draws attention to journalists threatened by censorship, surveillance, and violence. But this year, my mind turns to another, quieter threat to press freedom: exclusion by paycheque.

A new Reuters Institute report, to which I contributed a chapter on the employment conditions of journalists, indicates that the median after-tax salary for journalists in the UK is between £37,501 and £45,000. Meanwhile, the country’s best-paid media executive — at a business intelligence publisher — made £6.2 million last year, according to UK Media Rich List 2025.

At ITV, which bills itself as "the largest commercial broadcaster and streamer in the UK," the chief executive Carolyn McCall took home over £4 million last year, while the recently departed head of Reach Plc, the country’s largest news publisher and owner of The Mirror, took home over £1.2 million.

Even at the Guardian — long regarded as a beacon of values-driven journalism and owned by the Scott Trust — chief executive Anna Bateson earned £700,000 last year, a 75 per cent increase year-on-year, according to Press Gazette. That's roughly 16 times the estimated median salary at the organisation and equivalent to the revenue from 58,000 monthly all-access digital subscriptions, currently priced at  £12 per month. The steep increase, however, is due to Bateson joining midway through the 2023 financial year, so it does not reflect a real annual increase.

That is not just a pay gap — it is a freedom gap.

It raises an urgent question: how free is journalism when the people who do the reporting are increasingly underpaid, precarious, and drawn from a narrowing social pool?

The slow exclusion of working-class voices

This story is not only about money. It is also about class — and who gets to practise journalism at all.

Back in 2016, Mark Spilsbury’s report for the National Council for the Training of Journalists found that just 11 per cent of UK journalists came from working-class origins, compared to 33 per cent of the general workforce. The rest overwhelmingly came from professional or managerial households.

Fast-forward to 2025, and our report for the Reuters Institute confirms that little has changed, as co-editor Imke Henkel pointed out recently in The Conversation. Our survey finds that 74 per cent of journalists today come from professional or managerial backgrounds. Only a tiny fraction have parents who worked in routine or semi-routine occupations — factory workers, shop staff, care workers.

This is not about ability or aspiration. It is about access.

Those from lower-income households are:

• Less likely to be employed by national news outlets
• More likely to be freelance (i.e. economically vulnerable)
• Less likely to earn above £50,000

As pay stagnates and job security declines, the pipeline narrows further. When the cost of entry includes unpaid internships, expensive training, and years of low-paid work in London, it becomes clear: journalism may be open in theory, but closed in practice.

And when only the privileged can afford to be journalists, we do not just lose talent — we lose trust, relevance, and the ability to reflect the full spectrum of society.

Press freedom isn’t just about speech. It’s about conditions.

The romantic idea of the journalist as a fearless truth-teller is seductive. But it depends on material realities: job security, a fair wage, and enough support to pursue stories in the public interest — not just clickbait or sponsored content.

The Reuters report shows these foundations are being eroded. Permanent contracts have dropped from 74 per cent to 65 per cent in less than a decade. Freelancing is up to 28 per cent. Stress, burnout, and digital overload are endemic.

Add to this the massive pay disparity within the same organisations, and we are left with a profession whose conditions undermine its purpose.

A wider reckoning

These trends do not arrive in a vacuum. They follow deeper patterns that have been unfolding for more than a decade — patterns I have analysed in earlier research, including Down, but not out: Journalism jobs and media sustainability in the UK and, more recently, the News Futures 2035 foresight report.

Across both studies, one signal cuts through the noise: while the structures of media employment are fragmenting — with a rise in freelance work, declining job security, and widening pay gaps — the stakes are converging. They point us toward three fundamental imperatives: sustainability, equity, and resilience.

What we are seeing now, from precarious newsroom careers to executive compensation surging far ahead of journalistic wages, is not just a crisis of fairness. It is a test of journalism’s long-term viability — economically, socially, and democratically.

According to a recent UK survey by the High Pay Centre thinktank, 55 per cent of workers support capping CEO pay as a multiple of employee earnings. There is growing public recognition that extreme pay inequality weakens trust — in companies, institutions, and media alike.

So on World Press Freedom Day, perhaps we need to expand our definition of what threatens journalism.

It is not only hostile governments, digital disinformation, or declining ad revenue. It is also inequality within — between the newsroom and the boardroom. It is who can afford to be a journalist. And who gets left out.

Because if journalism is not economically inclusive, it cannot be democratically representative — and if it is not representative, it cannot claim to be truly free.

François Nel is a reader in media innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. He leads the postgraduate journalism innovation and leadership programme and the Media Innovation Studio group and is an associate director of the Institute of Creativity, Community and Culture. Currently, he coordinates a working group developing the sustainable innovation & leadership program. As the first academic executive member of the World Editors Forum of WAN-IFRA, he founded the World News Publishers Outlook study and co-edits World Press Trends Outlook.

This article also appeared on François Nel's LinkedIn and has been republished with permission.

Note: This article has been updated with an explanation of the steep increase in Anna Bateson's salary.

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