Using a Layered Approach for a Holistic View of Journalism Employment
This report presented past and present approaches for measuring local journalism employment, including the tradeoffs and limitations of each. It provided a snapshot of existing resources and approaches and a roadmap for how researchers could carry out their own projects assessing local journalism employment in their communities.
In summary, journalism employment is best measured through a layered approach, including combining multiple approaches to obtain a holistic view of journalism employment in a news organization. The approaches researchers use should reflect their research questions and goals and their concepts and units of analysis should be clearly defined.
In conclusion, we would like to offer some final recommendations and best practices:
1. Keep in mind definitional specificity
An important principle to keep in mind when you are conducting your research study is the different ways in which researchers define key concepts, including journalists and news organizations. When deciding which database(s) to use, it’s important to ensure you know these different definitions in order to apply them carefully and accurately.
2. Treat employment counts as indicators, not absolutes
There was broad agreement among members of the journalism employment working group that employment figures should be framed as signals of capacity, not definitive measures of community information needs or democratic health. Working group members noted that other factors — such as medium, ownership, and/or business model — can affect newsrooms’ capacity, beyond employment figures. In other words, two news organizations employing the same number of journalists can nonetheless have vastly different outputs.
3. Studies Should Document Tradeoffs Transparently
Future studies of journalism employment should acknowledge limitations and blind spots inherent to selected approaches or operationalizations — the Local Journalist Index’s Methodology section is a good example of this. In doing so, researchers should explain why particular methods were chosen over others, and clarify what conclusions can and cannot be drawn based on the selected methodology.
4. Reduce Burden on Newsrooms and Improve Research Coordination
Working group members repeatedly raised concerns about survey fatigue among news organizations and duplication of effort across policy and research initiatives. There was agreement that sharing instruments, aligning on definitions, and coordinating data collection are all important steps forward.
5. To Be Most Comprehensive, Combine Approaches
As noted throughout this toolkit, the most comprehensive and precise studies of local journalism employment combine multiple research approaches to cross-check and validate data. For example, a statewide survey could be combined with desk research and/or content- and byline-based approaches to account for nonrespondents. If the purpose you established in Step 1 demands precision and a “ground truth” — as in the case of policymakers, for example — consider combining methods for a more comprehensive assessment of local journalism employment in your region.
