Another point is that there's this image that being a good journalist means investigating. Movies or tv shows never mention the actual money you're getting for publishing online. I often see discussion here on how much engineers make. Everytime I read those, I can't believe the numbers. So let's talk money. In France the middle ground for an online paper is getting paid between 40 dollars for a short piece and 120 for a long one. That's usually 8000 characters for long ones, so more or less 800 to 1000 words. If you want to do a good job, it requiries usually two days : you have to research, get people's contacts. Agree on a time for three or four interview which are going to last between 30 minutes and an hour each. Then if you have everything (rarely happens) you have to write. If no one answers or you realize the subject was actually much more complicated than you thought, it might take a week or a month. The nature of the job makes it hard to know how long exactly something is going to take if you want to do it right... But at the end of the day, the amount of money you get paid doesn't change and you might just get paid 100 dollars for two days work, and that's before taxes. I'll talk about my own experience as a freelancer for a year here, and I'm actually one of the very lucky ones because I had work. I calculated that this year, I often got paid 1 or 2 euro the hour. I earned 300 or 400 a month - well, usually it's more 1500 a month, then nothing for two month, then 200, then 600, then nothing again... Often I got paid four months after being published - and sometimes on Paypal. I also worked for a big American media and they pay you the same amount as in France - except at the end you get a check and your bank at home will also cut its own share of it and you'll end up with two times less money. I am absolutely not exagerating. Of course, I stopped being a freelancer because I couldn't make it work. Yes, my job was more interesting and I was travelling and getting to cover more exciting stuff. But it couldn't compensate the stress that came with having literaly no money and my savings going down and down and down and down. So now I have a job that is actually one of the rare ones where I can do a good job in France and get paid ok. I'll still never earn more than 20 to 25K a year after taxes. But I'm lucky. Really. So imagine how it is for mostly everyone else.