How Many Journalists Are There, and Is the Number Falling?

How many journalists are there?

Fewer than most people assume. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks employment by occupation, counts 47,100 jobs in the category it calls news analysts, reporters and journalists as of its 2025 base year.

That figure deserves a moment's reflection from anyone in the placement business. Forty-seven thousand people, spread across every national outlet, every local newspaper and broadcaster, every trade publication and every digital title in a country of over three hundred million.

It also sets a bound on something this series has measured elsewhere. Research reported earlier here found that most journalists receive fifty or more pitches a week and reject the overwhelming majority as irrelevant. A small profession receiving that volume is a profession whose attention is structurally scarce, and no amount of spending changes the arithmetic.

The scarcity is the whole economics of earned coverage. It explains why independent attention cannot be bought at scale, why the purchasable formats examined throughout this series exist at all, and why the gap between the two keeps being sold as though it were not there.

For scale, that is roughly the population of a small town, covering a country of over 330 million people.

What does the projection actually say?

A decline of 6% between 2025 and 2035, amounting to a net loss of roughly 2,800 jobs.

That is a projection rather than a measurement, and BLS projections are careful, methodical and regularly revised. It is worth reading as the government's considered expectation rather than as a fact about the future.

The scale is also worth keeping in proportion. A 6% decline over a decade is a slow contraction, not a collapse, and it describes an occupation that has already absorbed far steeper losses in earlier years. The profession is not disappearing; it is continuing to shrink from a base that is already small.

Set against the rhetoric this subject usually attracts, the number is almost undramatic. What makes it consequential for anyone buying coverage is not the rate of decline but the absolute size — a shrinking pool of a few tens of thousands of people, whose attention is the thing earned media consists of.

It is also worth noting what a projection of this kind assumes. BLS models expected demand from industry trends and historical relationships; it does not attempt to forecast a structural break, such as a rapid shift in how news is funded or produced. A decade is long enough for such a break to occur, and the projection would not anticipate it.

Why is the number falling?

BLS gives its reasoning plainly, and it is the familiar account with an official source attached.

The first cause is revenue: “Declining advertising revenue in radio, newspapers, and television is expected to impact the long-term demand for these workers.” News organisations face continuing difficulty selling traditional advertising as their audiences move across platforms.

The second is structural. “News organizations also continue to consolidate and increasingly share resources, staff, and content with other media outlets”, which reduces hiring as organisations downsize. Consolidation means the same story is produced once and carried in many places, which is efficient and eliminates the duplicate jobs that once produced local versions of it.

BLS also records a counterweight: “Increasing demand for online news may offset some of the impacts from declining advertising revenue and downsizing.” Appetite for news has not fallen; the business model that funded reporting it has. That distinction runs through everything in this series about how coverage now gets made and paid for.

The consolidation point deserves particular attention from anyone pitching. Where outlets share staff and content, a single journalist's decision now determines what appears across several mastheads, which concentrates the value of each relationship and reduces the number of independent decisions being made about any given story.

Why are there still 3,400 openings a year?

Because people leave, and this is the most frequently misread statistic in the set.

BLS projects about 3,400 openings annually over the decade despite the overall decline, and is explicit that all of them are expected to “result from the need to replace workers who transfer to other occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire”.

So the openings are not growth. They are churn: a seat vacated rather than a seat created, in an occupation that is simultaneously shedding positions overall. A profession losing jobs while advertising thousands of vacancies a year is a profession with substantial turnover.

That has a practical consequence for anyone maintaining media relationships. Roughly 3,400 moves a year against a base of 47,100 implies that a meaningful share of the people covering any given beat will not be covering it in a few years' time. A contact list is a depreciating asset, and the relationship-based approach to coverage requires continuous rebuilding rather than one-time investment.

What does this figure not count?

A good deal, and the scope matters before anyone quotes the number.

The occupation code covers news analysts, reporters and journalists. It does not include editors, who are counted separately, nor photographers, broadcast technicians, or the producers who shape much of what reaches an audience. It also excludes public relations specialists, a considerably larger occupation, which is itself a telling asymmetry in a market where one side pitches and the other decides.

Employment data also counts jobs rather than people doing journalism. Freelancers, contractors, independent newsletter writers and the growing population of people publishing directly to audiences are captured inconsistently or not at all, and that population has grown as staff positions have contracted.

So 47,100 is best read as the size of the salaried newsroom workforce in a specific official category, not as the total number of people producing journalism. The direction of the projection is more robust than the absolute figure, and both are more reliable than anything produced by parties with something to sell — which, as this series has repeatedly found, describes most statistics in this field.

Nor does it capture how journalists spend their time. A staff position today frequently covers writing, editing, social distribution, video and audience work, which means the number of people employed as journalists and the amount of reporting being produced are related but not interchangeable.

What this means for anyone pitching or buying coverage

Start from the arithmetic. A few tens of thousands of working journalists, most of them receiving dozens of pitches weekly, in an occupation projected to keep contracting. Their attention is the scarcest input in this entire market, and no budget expands the supply.

That explains why the purchasable formats exist and why they are priced as they are. Wire distribution, contributed posts and sponsored articles are all ways of obtaining a published page without requiring a decision from one of those 47,100 people. They are genuine products with genuine uses, and they are not substitutes for the thing that is scarce.

It also argues for fewer, better-aimed approaches. Where the recipient pool is small and shrinking and already overwhelmed, relevance does more work than volume, and a pitch that fits what a specific journalist actually covers competes against a field of pitches that do not.

Media Morpheus sells placement, which is the purchasable side of this market. We think it is worth buying for what it is — reach, a citable record, a page that stays findable. What it cannot buy is a share of the attention of a profession this small, and any seller implying otherwise is selling against a number the government publishes for free.

Methodology and limitations

All employment figures in this report are from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook entry for News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists, covering the 2025 base year and the 2025–2035 projection decade, together with May 2025 wage data. Five limits apply. First, projections are estimates produced by a documented methodology and are revised periodically; they are not measurements of the future. Second, the occupation code excludes editors, photographers, producers and broadcast technicians, each counted separately, and excludes public relations specialists entirely. Third, employment data counts jobs rather than people, and captures freelance, contract and independent publishing work inconsistently, which likely understates the number of people producing journalism. Fourth, figures are United States only and do not describe media employment elsewhere. Fifth, the 2035 employment figure shown in the first chart is derived by applying the published net change to the published base year, rather than being a separately published BLS figure.

Conclusion

There are about 47,100 people employed as news analysts, reporters and journalists in the United States, and the government expects roughly 2,800 of those jobs to disappear over the next decade. The thousands of openings projected each year are replacements, not growth — seats vacated by people leaving an occupation that is still contracting. For anyone whose business depends on journalists deciding to write something, this is the number that governs everything: the attention being competed for belongs to a profession small enough to fit in a large stadium, already receiving more pitches than it can read, and getting smaller. The purchasable alternatives exist because that scarcity is real, and they should be bought in full knowledge of what they are substituting for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

1. official US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Outlook Handbook: News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists, employment 2025, projections 2025–2035, and May 2025 wage data.
2. vendor research Muck Rack, The State of Journalism, cited for pitch volume and rejection rates reported earlier in this series.