The media industry is 23 percent smaller than it was a decade ago

American media is shrinking.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

A single decade has seen the U.S. media industry shrink by nearly a quarter, a Pew Research analysis published Monday reports.

Newsroom jobs in America declined by 23 percent between 2008 and 2017, from 114,000 employees at newspapers, radio, cable, broadcast news, and digital-native outlets to just 88,000.

Newsroom employees include reporters, editors, photographers, and videographers. In every outlet category, reporters make up about half the newsroom staff.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Newspapers were hit particularly hard, losing 45 percent of employees over this time. Digital-native outlets fared the best, posting a gain of about 6,000 jobs. Broadcast television was the only other sub-sector to see improvement, reporting a slight expansion from 28,000 to 29,000 newsroom employees.

Read The Week's Ryan Cooper on why local government might be the solution to local newspapers' woes.

To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.