The provincial magazine publishers that I work for pay their deputy editors up to £5k less than the lofty £17k that these Guardian grumblers are moaning about.
Potential staff writers, section/features editors and 'trainee' sub editors are initially offered £9-10k to start, despite degrees and several years experience at other publishers.
They also don't pay anyone for overtime (despite 20+ hours obligatory overtime work needed every month for all staff on every 4-weekly mag, especially unfortunate designers, who are at the mercy of everyone elses's workflow).
A maximum of £40 a page for internal editorial freelance and £15 a page for designers (mainly by-the-numbers product reviews and PC tutorials), means that the office environment is permanently vicious and competitive, as people continually jockey to get commissioned for enough freelance from them to make their wage approach practicably liveable levels. Many employees, myself included (and especially single ones without the safety-net of a partner's income), work 60+ hours a week just to earn something towards the region of £17k. This desperation, of course, leads to a noticeable lack of quality and insight into the subjects being written about. Obviously, this does neither the readers or the staff any good at all. Product reviews and consumer comment may not be medical research publishing in terms of the importance of accuracy, but how many readers would want to trust a comparative feature on a range of similar products where the writers have barely bothered to open the boxes, or even worse, plagiarised other people's work from the Internet?

The southern town in which the company is based has property prices quite comparable to London (studio flats start at around £50k), yet few of the area's employers take this into account when formulating their remuneration policy. Many global household names (especially in banking, pharmaceuticals and insurance) have their head or European offices in and around the town. The readily available pool of qualified-but-desperate clerical labour is possibly one of the reasons for choosing this area to locate their offices.

A big irony is that the town's university provides degree courses in journalism, multimedia and communications which are among the most respected in the country. Another joke is that quite a number of this company's titles don't even have an editor - though your job title might be Deputy Editor, you are in effect editor of your magazine. There's one Section Editor for a popular computer games magazine that has completely run the title for three years, writing up to 80% of the content every month (sometimes using pseudonyms to fool the readers) without even being offered the title of Editor, let alone any more money. A Managing or Group editor oversees several magazines in a managerial capacity, for which they are paid at roughly half the going metropolitan rate, and also have to churn out large amounts of generic text to fill out their respective magazines at very short notice.

It seems strange, perhaps, that in the supposed 'information age', that those professionally responsible for presenting the public with the information that everyone needs in order to formulate their own informed decisions about purchases, opinions and world events in an environment that presents us with too much choice would be more highly regarded and rewarded. The reality of the situation is that all sections of the western media are heavily oversubscribed. A generational glut of over-qualified middle-class graduates have realised that getting paid to write is very easy and rewarding both personally and in terms of social status, and expect the rewards to be financial as well. Many newcomers to media jobs have comfortably off parental backgrounds whose money is a byproduct of less-glamorous travails, and it is the first time in their lives that they haven't gotten their own way. These arrivists seem to think that old notion of the proverbial starving writer living in a garret pedantically perfecting their craft on the poverty line does not apply to them - they want to be the next Stephen King, Michael Beurke or George Monbiot overnight. When they see what they perceive as their less-intelligent peers earning more and moving up the career ladder faster in arguably more mundane areas of business or civil service, they lack the insight to appreciate the advantages of their own position, and resort to pathological jealousy instead.

A few months ago, a few more socially aware junior staff members of the company where I am employed tried unionising employees and bringing them on board with the NUJ. Out of an editorial staff of around 100, a grand total of five were interested, three of whom merely wished to consolidate their NUJ membership from Student status. When asked individually for the apparent apathy, most staff indicated either an ignorance of the benefits that can be had from joining a union, or a mistrust of a powerless and out-of-touch organisation which seemed unrepresentative of their needs. Should we lay the blame for both of these opinions at the feet of the NUJ? You decide.

Personally though, I can never moan about my job or my wages, due to shame. My partner is a nurse - that is REAL work, and there are very few other jobs left in the western world that could be described that way. Those of us that sit in our comfy offices, whether in the media or not, or pursue other vocations that do not directly benefit others on a personal and individual face-to-face level, could do well to remember that the so-called 'stresses' of our privileged positions can all be considered completely imaginary in comparison to jobs like Nursing, and that the way that we choose to continue selfishly maintain the status quo in our society is directly responsible for the unbelievable poverty experienced by the other four-fifths of our world.