I was mainly a reporter and photojournalist. The pay often sucks, the stress is high, the workload is often ridiculous, and the competition is cut throat. Also, they expect you to fill all sorts of different roles at a lot of places (you aren’t just a photojournalist, you’re also a video editor, copy editor, fact checker, writer, etc.) because they claim they can’t hire more staff (even though the assholes at the top are making crazy amounts of money relative to what they pay staff).

I mostly worked for newspapers and a few magazines doing photography, editing, and writing with a dash of video. You can get by, especially if you sell out, but mostly it’s a miserable, thankless job for shit pay and tons of stress. It wasn’t really worth the occasional cool experiences when I couldn’t support my family very well. I work in tech now, making a living wage.