LEWES, Delaware — Chris Rausch owns one of the rare local news publications that’s booming rather than collapsing, but he can’t find new journalistic talent who can afford to move to the Delaware cape region.
“We’ve not been able to bring in any interns or new hires from out of the area for a couple of years,” said Rausch, publisher of The Cape Gazette, which is based near Rehoboth, Delaware, where President Joe Biden has a vacation home. “Our only recourse is to look for potential candidates who are already situated in the area.”
It’s a Catch-22 in the local news business in which some news outlets that enjoy steady advertising and older, affluent readers are also communities where housing is unattainable for younger journalists. Such markets include Martha’s Vineyard, the Delaware shore and wealthy beach cities in Florida and California.
The Delaware cape region has boomed in recent years as the Sussex County population grew 20.4% to more than 235,000 people in 2020, compared to 10% population growth in the rest of Delaware. The area has become a popular destination for retirees, many of them Baby Boomers who still enjoy reading and paying for newspapers. And advertisers like to reach those readers who have disposable time and income. That growth has dramatically impacted the housing market. Zillow shows a typical home value in Sussex County rose to $450,000 this year, up from about $250,000 a decade ago.
Soaring costs for new construction and few existing homes for sale “have driven housing costs through the roof,” Rausch said. “With land values at an all-time high, it’s not cost effective for developers to develop properties with affordable or workforce housing in mind.”
Rausch said homes to rent are scarce and command a high price from vacationers in the region. “It impacts us in several ways,” Rausch said. “It limits the quality of candidates we can consider. And two, it certainly impacts our ability to diversify our newsroom.”
Journalism is an industry often romanticized for its derring-do but loathed for its low pay. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates median annual pay for journalists in 2021 was $48,370. To make matters worse, those low-paying jobs are becoming fewer in number. Pew Research estimates newsroom jobs in 2021 totaled 85,000, a 26% drop from 2008. And many predict continued employment declines. Rising housing costs and inflation rates provide additional pressure on newsrooms and early career journalists.
The Vineyard Gazette on Martha’s Vineyard dates back to 1846 and still prints a broadsheet style newspaper read by well-heeled residents of the island such as Spike Lee, Carly Simon and the Obamas.
A study by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission in 2013 found that the island cost of living is 60 percent higher than the national average and housing prices are a whopping 96 percent higher. And some housing is simply unavailable in the summer. The Gazette reported that average monthly rent on the island was $1,459 in 2020, up from $1,180 in 2010. And searches for summer rentals indicate staying on the island can cost between $1,000 to $5,000 per week depending on the property.
The Gazette tried to host a paid summer business reporting intern in the summer of 2022 via a program I direct with the Dow Jones News Fund, but an intern we selected through the program was unable to find housing on Martha’s Vineyard. DJNF staff scoured rental listings. We even called friends and homeowners to inquire about rooms for rent. In the end, The Gazette wasn’t able to host an intern from the program because we couldn’t find housing.
“The housing situation is one reason I was so intent on raising minimum weekly pay for interns last year (2022) and am considering another increase for 2024,” said Shirley Carswell, director of the Dow Jones News Fund, noting that the minimum pay newsroom hosts by DJNF interns went to $525 per week, up from $400 a week (some newsrooms pay considerably higher rates). “It was a small bump but every little bit helps.”
Jane Seagrave, publisher of The Gazette, said Martha’s Vineyard faces a broader crisis with affordable housing and is just beginning to address the problem. “The economy has been so hot and housing has been bought up by people using it for short term rentals,” she said.
Seagrave said she has now rented two houses on Martha’s Vineyard, one to house a staff member and another to house summer interns. She wants to add a third property to house staff. She said it’s easy for The Gazette to find interns from wealthy families who live on the island but hiring with diversity in mind is more challenging. “Being able to offer housing to people helps us broaden our search,” she said.
Matthew Geiger, a student at Ohio University, was selected for the DJNF business reporting program last summer at BizDen, a local online business publication in Denver founded by Aaron Kremer. Geiger said he had a great experience reporting, but moving to Denver and finding housing was a challenge. He said he spent most of the summer in student housing at the University of Denver but he also had to rent two separate AirBnBs at the beginning and end of the internship.
“There were days where the commute was a bit grueling,” he said. “If I had lived closer to where I worked, then I would have had more time to do things I enjoyed outside of work.” He tried looking for low-cost sublets but his pet allergies limited roommate options.
Kremer said housing issues are “definitely sticky” for news entrepreneurs like him to navigate as well. “We are such a small business,” he said, “to get pulled into early staffers’ housing challenges is not ideal. It’s not our core business. What we want to spend time on is finding stories and writing them.”
Matthew Geiger enjoys the Colorado mountains during his internship in 2022 for BizDen, a Denver business publication. He enjoyed the internship but finding housing was a challenge.
Geiger is now completing a master’s degree in economics at Ohio University and looking for jobs in either economics or economics reporting, ideally that let him afford housing. He’s not alone.
“We need to put together a summer/internship housing guide for college journalists. That is one of the most difficult elements of the summer,” tweeted Jaden Amos, now an audience editor at Axios and an alum of Indiana University in Bloomington. Amos interned at The San Francisco Chronicle in the summer of 2021 and tweeted that she “paid around $2,000 a month in SF in a 4 bed 2 bath where we didn’t have a living room.”
Other young journalists responded to Amos’ tweets by telling their stories of being scammed on Facebook Marketplace and losing thousands of dollars while trying to secure an apartment for an internship. I wrote to Jaden and asked if she had any updated thoughts from that 2021 tweet. “This is still a problem,” she said. “I don’t know if the answer is all internships being remote though. I found real value working in a newsroom when I was an intern.”
At the Pacific Coast Business Times, Henry Dubroff is the chairman, founder, editor and majority owner of a news outlet that serves beach communities such as Santa Barbara and Ventura. He said it’s easy for him to recruit interns from area colleges and universities such as UC Santa Barbara but “retaining employees is very difficult” because of the high cost of housing with apartment rents averaging $2,000 a month and starter homes that cost $1 million or more.
“There is no way staff can afford to live here,” Dubroff told Poynter. Most of his staff lives in Ventura County roughly 30 miles away and must drive to the office because of few public transit options. As a result, he said he loses reporters to jobs in local tourism, PR and communications.
“I loved my time as a journalist and at PacBiz, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything!” said Annabelle Blair, who worked as a staff writer at Pacific Coast Business Times first as an intern with the Dow Jones News Fund and then for more than a year as a full-time hire. She covered housing and real estate in Santa Barbara, an area where she also “moved over five times in three years,” she said.
She recalls renting “half a room” in a university community nicknamed “slum beach paradise” with high rent and packed conditions near the beach. She once shared a three-bedroom house with six other women and a dog. “One woman lived in a shed in the back with the washer and dryer,” Blair recalls.
Blair said she recalls attending fancy dinners and events as a business journalist and feeling awkward driving up to valet parking “in my beat up car.” She said the cost of living, unaffordable housing and glaring wealth inequality became reasons she had to transition from journalism into corporate communications and branding. Blair is now working full time and pursuing an MBA at the University of Texas at Dallas.
“We try to be as generous as possible with raises. We are very lenient about remote work for people who live in Ventura,” Dubroff said. “We encourage people to get training and fellowships through (the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing) and other sources so they feel like they are growing and developing new skills.”
Sarkes Tarzian is an Indiana-based company that owns six radio stations in Indiana, two TV stations, KTVN-TV in Reno, Nevada, and WRCB-TV in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Company chief Tom Tarzian and his station leaders launched an internship program this summer in Reno and Chattanooga that would provide housing for interns from colleges outside their coverage areas in addition to paying for 40 hours per week of work. We thought “providing housing would remove a difficulty for the students that might prevent them from taking the internship,” Tarzian said.
In Washington D.C., the National Press Club offers a Lewis Scholarship that provides free housing and a $4,000 stipend to student journalists of color who have secured a newsroom internship in Washington, D.C. “The scholarship is designed to help remove barriers to exploring journalism in the nation’s capital,” wrote Holly Butcher Grant in an email this March. The press club offers the scholarship multiple times throughout the year.
Aaron Kremer has started paying $1,000 per week for interns to compete with some higher New York internship salaries. Housing dilemmas remain “stressful” for his teams in Denver and Richmond (where he owns Richmond Biz Sense). He has arranged a “barter situation” with a hotelier in Richmond so that Kremer’s company has room credits in exchange for some advertising. He’s used those room credits to occasionally put up an intern or new staff member who is searching for a home. This summer, one intern will be commuting an hour per day from her parent’s house and will use the hotel credits at times in the middle of the week.
“A lot of people aren’t used to focusing and hustling,” said Kremer, noting he wants to retain more employees in the one- to three-year range and prevent them from burning out. He said he’s trying several ways to retain entry-level staff members including competitive pay, better vacation packages, more three-day weekends, raises for 13 years straight. Lately, he’s been adding happy hours, company apparel and occasional team outings to pro sports events.
Kim Kleman, executive director of Report for America, said her organization helps fund staff reporters at rural news outlets across the United States. It sets a minimum salary of $32,000 for journalists because “we can’t find early career reporters who can live on something less.” A few newsrooms that take reporters from the RFA program — including KUCB radio in Unalaska, Alaska; Rappahannock News in Virginia and WHQR public radio in Wilmington, North Carolina — offer staff apartments or housing.
“For us, it’s not just the housing,” Kleman said. “It’s the relatively low salary and everything you have to do to live on that salary that can cramp our reporters.”
Kleman said her organization sometimes offers an advance stipend and pays moving costs to help these younger journalists arrive in a local community and find housing. The program has expanded from a one-year commitment with an optional second year to being a two-year program with an optional third year. “We try to be the reason these reporters would give three to four years to these communities where they might not otherwise be,” she said. Training sessions, mentor networks and a mission-driven sense of RFA is what “we hope are helping reporters stay.”
Kleman said veteran journalists should be careful of telling young journalists to just survive on a low salary for years on end. “We weren’t carrying the kind of student debt these emerging journalists are now,” she said. “It would be my dream to offer student debt forgiveness as part of Report for America.”
Back in Delaware, Rausch said Sussex County is pursuing a workforce housing ordinance, but it will take years to translate into actual housing.
“As a small, independent media company, we do not have the resources to purchase the real estate for housing,” he said. “Foundation support may be our best bet.” He said he’s in contact with Delaware’s Local Journalism Initiative to consider options. He believes it may be years before that organization has resources and a plan in place.