Is it hard to become a Music Journalist?

If you're a music journalist, can you please answer this question?

• My English class is required to write a speech on our dream career. For a long time, I've been wanting to become a music journalist for Rolling Stone. What kind of education/training do you need to become a professional music journalist, and what is a journalist's salary/benefits?

• Answer:

  There's really no set line of experience you need to become a music journalist. Some go get journalism degrees, others make a name as a writer by dropping out of high school and writing about how their lives on tour with bands. As far as salary and benefits for that job, it could vary widely between $0 a year and maybe $200,000 a year, if you're pretty prolific and write like Rick Bragg. Most music journalists are freelancers, though, which means they don't specifically work for a magazine, but instead sell an article at a time to the magazine. Stories can sell from a few cents a word to $10,000, maybe, so that's impossible to nail down. And then when you're a freelancer, you get no benefits because you're not a company employee. There's really not a good answer for your question. There are a million ways to break into music journalism, although some journalism training wouldn't hurt. But it's more about initiative and your ability to actually find and cover something interesting. It's not a job where you can just sit at your mom's house, listen to the new OK Go album and talk about how cool the synthesizers sound.