LNIC Research Reports

SCOPE IT: Understanding How to Measure
Journalism Employment

Jennifer R. Henrichsen, Sakshi Bhalla, Louisa Lincoln, Benjamin Toff, and Lisa Waananen Jones
September 2026 | Download Report (PDF)

Table of Contents

Introduction

About This Report

Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix A: Sample Survey Questions

Appendix B: Table of Strengths/Weaknesses of Various Approaches

Appendix C: Responses by County to Washington State Staffing Survey

Download PDF
Appendix B

Table of Strengths/Weaknesses of Various Approaches


MethodStrengthsWeaknesses
Occupational and Labor Statistics
  • National scope
  • Consistency over time
  • Legitimacy for trend analysis
  • Occupational categories align poorly with newsroom roles
  • Weak geographic specificity
  • Limited ability to distinguish local vs. non-local work
  • Poor capture of part-time, freelance, intern, and volunteer labor
Surveys of Journalists or News Organizations
  • Ability to tailor definitions and adapt to local context
  • Capture part-time, freelance, intern, and volunteer labor
  • Provides “ground truth” to other measurement approaches
  • Low or uneven response rates
  • High labor costs
  • Sensitivity around budgets and staffing disclosure
  • Challenges with participation from newspaper chains
  • Difficult to update regularly
Desk Research and Manual Compilation
  • Highly accurate when carefully executed
  • Adaptable to local context
  • Useful where policy precision is required
  • Extremely labor-intensive; difficult to replicate
  • Highly dependent on researcher judgment
  • Hard to scale, sustain, or update
Commercial or Platform-Based Data
  • Publicly observable
  • Lower burden on newsrooms
  • Useful for comparative analyses
  • Incomplete datasets
  • Opaque filtering and classification
  • Instability over time
  • Uncertain alignment with “local” or newsroom-specific definitions
Content- and Byline-Based Approaches
  • Publicly observable
  • Lower burden on newsrooms
  • Useful for comparative analyses
  • Weak connection between output and labor inputs
  • Inability to capture precarity, workload, or unpaid labor
  • Difficult to discern geography
  • Not comparable across mediums (e.g. newspaper vs. broadcast)

Table of Contents

Introduction

About This Report

Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix A: Sample Survey Questions

Appendix B: Table of Strengths/Weaknesses of Various Approaches

Appendix C: Responses by County to Washington State Staffing Survey

Download PDF
Send us your Feedback

The LNIC sees this journalism employment toolkit as a living document and, as such, the research team welcomes suggestions and additions to the toolkit. If you would like to share your suggestions with the research team, please contact the lead author at jennifer.henrichsen@wsu.edu.

 

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