Clarify Your Concepts 

Next, it’s important to define the concepts you plan to use for your study. Two aspects that are key to any journalism employment study include: who counts as a journalist, and what counts as local.

Who counts as a journalist?

While this might seem like a straightforward question, determining who “counts” as a journalist quickly begins to get complicated when attempting to measure and assess the number of journalists working in a given community.

For example, do only full-time employees at an established news organization count as a journalist, for the purposes of your study? What about part-time staff, freelancers, or regular contributors? Students or interns? Volunteers?

Even among full-time journalists at established news organizations, will your study include editorial staff that do not necessarily get bylines on individual articles? For example, an editor-in-chief, a photojournalist, or digital producer  may or may not “count” as a journalist under some definitions. Ultimately, the answer to this question will vary depending on the aforementioned purpose of the study and, to an extent, the data available. 

There are three main approaches you can take when conceptualizing newsroom labor, with increasing specificity regarding the job roles performed.

The first approach focuses on headcounts of individuals employed at news outlets, often across job roles. Fluctuations in these headcounts serve as indicators of organizational health and shifts in response to major economic shocks or industry-wide recessions.

The second perspective focuses on labor performed by the employee, regardless of employer. Journalistic labor can often occur outside traditional news organizations, such as nonprofits, PR firms, or on digital platforms like YouTube. This measure explains the broader demand for journalistic skillsets across the economy, irrespective of the sector to which they are attached.

Lastly, the most specific approach examines the intersection of role and organization. In this case, the analysis is limited to individuals who report and edit specifically within organizations that specialize in news production. 

Each measure captures some part of the labor market, leaving out some others. The tradeoff therefore, is best determined by the purpose underlying this exercise. For a policymaker, for example, full-time journalists within traditional news media may be the most applicable definition to inform legislation. But for a journalist or an academic researcher, it may be necessary to develop a broader definition that includes a wider array of roles. Keep the purpose of your study front-of-mind as you define who counts as a journalist.

Two aspects that are key to any journalism employment study include: who counts as a journalist, and what counts as local.

What counts as local?

Similarly, a relatively straightforward question quickly becomes convoluted when measuring the number of journalists in a previously-determined, well-defined locale. Most importantly, researchers must determine whether they count local journalists based on where their news organization is physically based, where the journalists are based, or the region the journalists cover. 

Take Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in Portland, Oregon. John is a local reporter at OPB and lives in Portland, but he covers the neighboring community of Vancouver, Washington. If your definition of local is centered on John’s place of employment and where he is based, he would count as a local journalist in Portland. But if your definition of local is based on John’s coverage area, he would count as a local journalist in Vancouver, Washington. The importance of these definitions is even more stark for John’s colleague, Jane, who reports for OPB from her home in Bend — more than three hours away from the organization’s headquarters in Portland. Would your definition of local count Jane as a reporter in Portland, or Bend? John and Jane at OPB are fictional examples, but they nonetheless illustrate the importance of clearly defining how you and your study are conceptualizing “local” journalists. 

To concretize this a bit further, we’ve provided the example of the regional outlet InvestigateWest. The outlet is physically based in Seattle, Washington, but it covers Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Additionally, journalists who work at the outlet reside throughout the coverage area.

Figure 1: Example Comparison of Location Methods. InvestigateWest is a regional news outlet that shows how different location methods can affect the resulting information. The outlet location is Seattle; coverage area is Oregon, Washington, and Idaho; and journalist residency includes cities distributed throughout the coverage area. (Note: Location information is from the outlet’s website and LinkedIn as of July 2026. Map omits one editorial staff member based in Colorado.)

In studies analyzing the local news ecosystem, researchers have defined a local news organization as one that must either be a) located in a particular state and primarily oriented to that state’s community or b) located outside of that state, but primarily oriented toward that state community. To meet the first criterion, the outlet is based in the state if its physical address or mailing address is in the state and its primary address is a community in that state. To meet the second criterion, an outlet can still be considered local if it is not located in the state, but its primary audience or one of its primary audiences is a community in that state, evident in a state demonym in the outlet’s name, substantial circulation or broadcast in a state community, or an explicit description that the outlet serves a community in that state.¹

1. Jennifer R. Henrichsen, Pawel Popiel, Elizabeth Chambers, Alexandra Fil, Katie Robinson-Tay, Lisa Waananen Jones, Joanne Lisosky, Ryan J. Thomas, Jody Brannon, and Ben Shors, From News Deserts to Nonprofit Resilience: Assessing the Health of Washington’s Local News Ecosystem (Pullman, WA: Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University, March 2025), https://news-fellowship.murrow.wsu.edu/documents/2025/10/news-ecosystem.pdf/ ↩︎