Media Layoffs & Employment

Mergers, closures and layoffs have affected many media organizations. Here are 10 charts on the state of newsroom employment in the U.S. today.

Newsroom employment dropped by a quarter between 2008 and 2018, but the job cuts were not shouldered equally by journalists of all ages.

About one-in-five newsroom employees (22%) live in these three metro areas, which, by comparison, are home to 13% of all U.S. workers.

Mid-market newspapers were the most likely to suffer layoffs in 2018. Digital-native news outlets also faced continued layoffs.

Newsroom employees are more likely to be white and male than U.S. workers overall. There are signs, though, of a turning tide: Younger newsroom employees show greater racial, ethnic and gender diversity than their older colleagues, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.

Newsroom employees are more than twice as likely as other U.S. workers to be college graduates. But they tend to make less money than college-educated workers in other industries.

Newspaper layoffs have far from abated in the past year, and digital-native news outlets are also suffering losses. At least 36% of the largest U.S. newspapers and at least 23% of the highest-traffic digital-native news outlets experienced layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018.

The U.S. has more foreign students enrolled in its colleges and universities than any other country in the world. Explore data about foreign students in the U.S. higher education system.

The number of black journalists working at U.S. daily newspapers has dropped 40% since 1997. That represents a loss of almost 1,200 journalists — from 2,946 in 1997 to 1,754 in 2013.

Despite revenue from political ads and fees paid by cable and other companies to carry their programming, the picture for local TV newsrooms is a mixed one.