Analysis | Wait, does America really still employ a ton of news reporters?

Through everything — the rise of the internet, the rise of social media, the fall of Huey Lewis and the News, the novel coronavirus — journalism jobs stayed more or less flat.

But maybe not right away.

We cherished our tiny sliver of hope and weren’t ready to reach for the tweezers. It felt nice, however briefly, to coexist with the remote possibility that American journalists were secretly chugging along, hale and hearty as ever.

And we’ve embarked on enough of these supposedly hopeful columns to know that once we started pulling on threads, the whole cozy illusion would unravel.

But a decent journalism rule of thumb — take notes, all you interns — is that you probably shouldn’t ignore reality indefinitely. We’ll start with the obvious point: Flat counts as a win only in Zamboni driving and concrete finishing. America has almost 20 percent more jobs and people than it did in 2000. If journalists are treading water, they’re losing ground.

But when the alternative is drowning, treading water sounds amazing.

We know from other data that newspaper publishing is, as an industry, red all over. Newspapers lost 77 percent of their jobs over the past 20 years, the single steepest dive taken by any of the 532 industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

How do you reconcile the continuing existence of news jobs with the collapse of the news industry? If you’re like us, you might guess it had something to do with the obnoxiously nerdy distinction between occupation and industry. The first describes a worker’s job such as editor, blacksmith or accountant. The second describes an employer’s sector such as newspapers, theater companies or iron foundries.

Perhaps newspapers had protected editors and reporters while slashing every other occupation?

After all, while we focus on the bloviators with bylines, newspapers have long been an industry in the smoke-stackiest sense of the word. Even midsize dailies were once gritty, sprawling manufacturing and logistics outfits that employed factory workers, delivery drivers, door-to-door sales staff and more.

As recently as the early 2000s, reporters made up just 9 percent of the workforce at the average newspaper. Now, we’re 19 percent. Editors have increased almost as rapidly, with both jobs comprising bigger and bigger slices of a smaller and smaller pie.

In absolute terms, the number of newspaper reporters and editors has dropped by an astonishing 56 and 63 percent, respectively, since 2000. It’s just that almost everyone else in news (other than tech-related jobs) has had it even worse. Production and sales jobs have dropped by around 90 percent.

The confusing part? People are still spending money on news. Last year, adjusted for population growth and inflation, spending on “newspapers and periodicals” hit its highest level since 2001, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Maybe a handful of heavyweight national newspapers thrived while everyone else got hammered? If that were true, we’d expect to see employment climb in Washington and New York — the nation’s political and financial capitals — while wilting, unfortunately, in less-influential areas.

But newspaper jobs have vanished everywhere, according to our beloved Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (To be sure, a slightly slower decline in those two metros means they were home to about 17 percent of newspaper jobs by 2022, up from their more traditional 10 percent.)

But our anxious focus on newspapers — a fourish-century-old technology — may be akin to wondering why there are still so many jobs in wheel-making when the horse-drawn buggy industry is on the rocks.

If we look at other kinds of publishers, we’re nigh-on blinded by a massive bright spot: internet publishing. In a handful of states — notably New York, California and Washington — the industry that includes anything from blogs to Bing has grown fat on advertising and other revenue that once went to Podunk print publications.

Which raises a complementary theory: Maybe we have just as many reporters and editors, they’re just working for outlets that don’t bother hiring tweens to dump dead trees on your porch each morning. After all, the newspaper industry definition used by Census here doesn’t include online-only publications (though that’s changing as new definitions roll out).

Alas, deeper analysis reveals that reporters and editors make up just 4 percent of workers in internet publishing, compared with the third of employees who are computer programmers or administrators, and the quarter who are in management. Even in our extremely online age, only about 1 in 20 editors and reporters work for what the government classifies as online publishers.

Still, it’s a clue. There must be other sectors out there snapping up folks with newspaper skills. After all, you can be an editor or even a reporter in many industries.

We decided to narrow our focus to reporters. (Editor can mean many things, but reporter seems specifically news related. The government’s endless examples of the job include cub reporter, art critic, legman, news anchor and market reporter.) At the turn of the millennium, more than half of reporters worked for newspapers and another quarter worked in broadcasting. Now, the two industries combined don’t employ even half of America’s reporters.

The fastest-growing industry categories for reporters, other than internet publishing, are independent journalists and a category that includes newswires and other distribution services. Similarly, while nonprofits cut across industries, the number of reporters working at such outlets has more than doubled over the past two decades. Today, nearly 1 in 10 reporters work at a nonprofit, whether an upstart neighborhood newsletter, a revered public broadcaster or one of several fast-growing public interest investigative shops.

But that still leaves a broad “other” category, which has grown substantially in its own right. It includes scores of industries and doesn’t fit any clean pattern. So who are those reporters?

The numbers kept telling us they were pretty similar to any other reporter in terms of pay, hours worked, age and gender balance. That’s when we realized the answer must be the real-deal reporters who don’t happen to be in any news-related industry.

Consider David “Spork Pollster” Montgomery, YouGov data journalist and a veteran of several daily papers. Or the reporters at Redfin, a national brokerage that releases endless analyses of real estate data. Or, like, half the folks we’ve cited at the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan “fact tank” that churns out data analyses. Or the communications teams who write up research at hundreds of universities, engaged in the same weekly grind we are, only with a focus on research from one specific institution and fewer dumb jokes.

Why are their ranks growing? Well, the decline of traditional media has scrambled public relations. Nationally, public relations reps now outnumber reporters almost 2 to 1 (and about 7 to 1 if you’re only counting newspaper reporters). As persistent PR pitchman Matt Siegler made the rounds after the covid crisis, calling editors at small papers on behalf of his clients, he noticed that the lines between local news and private industry were blurring.

“Newspaper and magazine publishers and editors are increasingly requesting, ‘Have your expert write the story. I don’t have the time,’” Siegler told us. “This is largely due to news interviewers being spread thinner than ever at publications and needing to wear multiple hats.”

So he built an entire side gig — Contributed Content Connection, now part of a media-monitoring firm — around linking cash-starved newspapers with private sector experts who could fill the papers’ threadbare pages with “content” about health-care costs, franchising or even practicing gratitude. He won’t call it reporting, and you won’t see it in a national paper, but it might hint at the grander forces scattering reporters to every corner of the North American Industry Classification System.

Speaking of which, it all probably comes back to heavy industry. When reporting the news no longer requires you to build a manufacturing and distribution empire to support a handful of scribes, and when fewer newspaper reporters remain to answer your calls and distribute your news anyway, it seems reasonable to take matters into your own hands. And in many cases, as with YouGov or the ambitious Sherwood News (an outlet spawned by the meme stock merchants at Robinhood), they’re doing a bang-up job.

So, incredibly, yes: America still has reporters (and editors). They’re a little different. They have hollowed out in age, with fewer in their prime earning years and more youngsters and folks in their 60s. And a few of them might not be as independent as they once were. But we’re all still beavering away, working the same long hours for the same unimpressive pay, feeding fact-checked information to a doubt-racked nation.

Which, at this late stage of the media apocalypse, counts as genuinely wonderful news.

Greetings! The Department of Data collects queries. What are you curious about: Why the sudden boom in employment for sculptors, painters and other visual artists in the charts above? Is cancer really killing more millennials? Is AI coming for anyone’s job yet? Just ask!

If your question inspires a column, we’ll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week’s envelope goes to our friend and colleague Dorine Bethea, whose keen queries nudged us finally to pull this thread.