SALARY SURVEY

A total of 572 magaziners completed our anonymous questionnaire, with the overwhelming number of you (91%) opting to go the online route via SurveyMonkey.com.

If participation is any indication, interest in the survey is growing. In 2004, response rate spiked by 50%. This year it jumped again by 27%. When Masthead launched the Survey in 1990, it was designed not only to satisfy curiosity but to address the need for some kind of benchmark, something that managers could use when determining compensation packages. That need remains, and this survey continues to be one of the most requested articles that we publish.

This year we’ve improved it in several ways:

• We are now reporting median and not average salary. (Thanks to Atlantic Business editor Dawn Chafe for this suggestion.) What’s the difference? Quick math lesson. Outrageous extremes distort reality. Implausible publishers pulling in $10,000 skew that category in the same way that high-flying editors making $250,000 distort theirs. The median approach arranges all salaries in a row and selects the middle one resulting in a figure that half the respondents exceed, and half fall short of. It’s simply a more realistic assessment of who’s making what. Nevertheless, we still report on those crazy extremes, so there’s still an opportunity to laugh and cry. (see Chart Legend).
• Note that we’ve split the consumer mag category into small-to-medium and large circulation, allowing you to plot a more precise route to your cell on the chart. As a general rule, the bigger the circ, the better the pay. We always suspected that was the case—now we can demonstrate it.
• We have computed “The Experience Factor.” We all know seniority counts for something. We now have an idea of just how much. Aggregating all positions and tagging those with less than five years’ experience as the baseline, you can compute the financial premium that comes with your years of experience.
• Commission rates have long clouded the salary figures for sales reps, directors and publishers. We’ve taken steps to get behind those brute figures by breaking out the median percentage of commission versus salary in those categories. The result, we trust, will shed more light on these two central components of compensation.

Finally, a word about demographics. Women remain the best responders to this survey, representing 65% of the total sample; the best responders by department continue to be editorial workers.

We thank everyone for their participation. Feedback is always welcome at salarysurvey@masthead.ca. M