Creating a Baseline Understanding of How to Measure Journalism Employment
Journalism is in a state of crisis in many parts of the world, including in the United States, with implications for civic life and democratic governance. Academic institutions and nonprofit organizations have conducted research revealing the deteriorating environment afflicting local journalism, from economic and financial concerns to safety and security issues.
In response to the local journalism crisis, leading academic researchers came together to form the Local News Impact Consortium (LNIC), and in 2025, it was officially established as a nonprofit organization with a ratified governance plan and board. The overarching research question guiding the LNIC’s efforts is, “How can we collect more systematic measures of changes in the health of our local news ecosystems?” This question is vitally important because local information ecosystems are changing faster than we can study them; inconsistent approaches to measurement and lack of standards undermine our ability to assess changes over time and across geographies; and the scale of the challenge is too large for a fragmented research community to tackle each aspect individually on its own.
The LNIC created five working groups focused on different aspects of the news crisis:
- The Newsroom Census
- Computational Methods
- Audiences and the Public
- Journalism Employment
- Economic Impact.
This report, SCOPE IT: Developing Shared Approaches to Assessing Local Journalism Employment, results from conversations with members of the Journalism Employment Working Group and research conducted by the authors. The Journalism Employment Working Group focuses on studying changes in the local journalism employment landscape, including how to develop feasible, standardized approaches to measuring how many jobs are devoted to covering local news in a given geographic community with greater accuracy and precision.
More specifically, the Journalism Employment Working Group has focused on the following research questions:
- What are the past, present, and future approaches researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders might use for measuring local news employment?
- What are the tradeoffs and limitations around each of these approaches?
- What guidelines or recommendations does the working group suggest for how to collect more standardized data on this subject?
The answers to these questions can be found in this toolkit, which is designed to help readers create studies that measure and assess local journalism employment within a given geographic area. Different readers will arrive at this toolkit with a different set of questions. As such, this toolkit is intended to be flexible, based on the needs of the reader and the guiding questions at hand.
The toolkit proposes the SCOPE IT framework, which involves seven steps for individuals to consider when conducting journalism employment research, including:
- Specify your purpose and unit of analysis
- Clarify your concepts
- Outline your geographic scope
- Pick your time period
- Establish your approach
- Investigate through analysis
- Test with feedback and share findings
Who is this toolkit designed for?
- Policymakers: The employment landscape for local news is a top priority for policymakers and policy organizations like Rebuild Local News, which are lobbying state legislatures and local governments to invest in creating more local journalism jobs.
- Journalism funders, including Press Forward local chapters: Many place-based foundations are increasingly interested in funding local journalism in their communities. This toolkit will help funders better understand and assess their existing local news infrastructure in terms of journalism jobs.
- Researchers, both academic and non-academic: This toolkit is designed to be accessible to researchers of all kinds, including those across disciplines and/or without extensive academic experience or training.
- Practitioners: Other practitioners from news organizations, journalism support groups, and civic and community organizations that are interested in better understanding their local news landscape in terms of journalism employment.
What does this toolkit enable readers to do?
This toolkit allows readers to gain insight into the complicated picture of journalism employment in the United States and provides guidance on the possible steps individuals should consider when carrying out research projects measuring the health of journalism employment.
What does this toolkit not do?
This toolkit does not provide a “one-size fits all” solution to the study and measurement of journalism employment.
Why measure journalism employment?
It is important to measure journalism employment to understand the relative health of a news organization. When news organizations face ownership changes and funding constraints, they often face job losses. These cuts do damage to the news organization’s ability to cover communities fully and by extension, individuals’ willingness to pay for the product. Too often, news organizations are operating as shells of their former selves. These so-called “ghost” news organizations may have retained their name, but have lost staff and can no longer report local stories like they did previously. Instead, they may rely on filler content like reproducing press releases, wire or syndicated content, to fill their pages. Thus, by measuring journalism employment, it might be possible to identify when a news organization is on the verge of collapse and intervene before further degradation occurs.
Measuring journalism employment is important for numerous stakeholders, including:
- Journalism support organizations (e.g., Press Forward Local Chapters) who are trying to understand their local news environments;
- Philanthropic organizations and individuals who want to invest in journalism;
- Policymakers who want to understand the health of local news organizations and how best to support them, such as through policies that would provide funding to news organizations with a certain number of employees (e.g., Washington State Senate Bill 5400);
- Research labs, centers, and individuals who seek to understand and support the future of journalism and its relationship to civic engagement and democracy.
