Salary Survey: Methodology

Responses to mediabistro's salary survey were collected anonymously via a web-only poll. Users did not have to be registered or logged in to complete the survey.

Results are available for four geographical regions. U.S. states in each region are as follows:

• Northeast: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont;
• South: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Caroline, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington DC;
• Midwest: Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin;
• West: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Hawaii, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

Results for locations outside of the U.S. are not included in this report, but can be found on this International Data page.

In some areas, the survey received only moderate responses, for which data is available, but not considered likely to be representative of salary rates in the given category. Survey participants were asked to identify themselves as either full-time staffers or freelancers at the beginning of the survey. For purposes of this report, only the staff data is presented. Of the total respondents, 12,560 identified themselves as staffers and 3,179 identified themselves as freelancers. Results for respondents who identified themselves as freelancers can be found on this Freelance Data page.

Because the salary survey was conducted as an online poll, the sample represented is not truly random and may be affected by variables including, but not limited to, disparities between mediabistro's user demographic and overall industry demographics, the predisposition of certain demographic subsets to respond to online polling and the period of time during which the poll was available.

Salaries are divided into three subsets:

• 25th percentile: data reported is higher than 25% of all respondents in the category;
• 50th percentile (median): data reported is higher than 25% of all respondents in the category;
• 75th percentile: data reported is higher than 75% of all respondents in the category.

Some job titles that were deemed to be identical were combined for purposes of this report.

Outlier data deemed to be of no statistical significance was removed for purposes of the calculations presented in the report.

Summary of number of respondents by industry and region:

Note: Categories with fewer than 10 respondents were not included in the primary report.

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