The lost newspaper jobs of 2025 -- and some thoughts on saving local news

Jobs dropped by 8 percent, and that's not counting what just happened at the Washington Post and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Scene from a Feb 5 rally outside the offices of the Washington Post after the paper announced devastating layoffs. Wikimedia Common image by Sdkb - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Two weeks back, my former employer the Washington Post laid off more than 300 journalists, a shocking development even in such a beleaguered industry. There aren’t many U.S. media outlets that can lay off that many reporters and still continue to exist.

The Post is both unique — national audience, powerful brand, huge size, at least until recently — and yet part of a pattern. Newspaper job losses have, if anything, been proportionately even more brutal at smaller local outlets, thousands of which have simply closed up since the year 2000.

We now have new data underscoring this. Last week, nestled within the big Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly job report, we received a preliminary December 2025 jobs figure for the newspaper industry: 78,800. This number, though it may change somewhat, completes the set for 2025, and allows us to begin to take the measure of the entire year.

And it isn’t good.

Some stats:

• In December of 2024, employment in the U.S. newspaper industry stood at 85,700 jobs. With a reduction to 78,800 one year later, we’re looking at the loss of an estimated 6,900 positions, or an 8 percent decrease. (The loss from Dec 2023 to Dec 2024 was slightly higher, at 7,300 positions, but about the same as a percentage.)

• The figures above are seasonally adjusted. Although it presents more of a lagged picture, we can also compare the annual average number of jobs in 2024 vs 2025 with unadjusted data. Using this approach, we see a decline from 89,200 positions down to 83,400, or a loss of 5,800 jobs (a 6.5 percent decrease). That’s a smidge smaller than the decline from 2023 to 2024, which shows a loss of about 6,600 jobs, a nearly 7 percent decrease by this method.

Before going further, let me include some notes on the data, which can be retrieved here (newspapers are under the “Information” super sector).

These data include all newspaper job positions, not just the jobs of reporters or editors. They should include jobs related to the websites or online editions of newspapers, not only their print versions. But they would not reflect any offsetting growth in online publishing at non-newspaper outlets, like say, Substack. Nor do they speak to trends in other media sectors like broadcast television, radio, and so on, which have fared at least a little better than newspapers.

The BLS numbers also tend to shift around a bit before they settle, as the agency prizes getting preliminary estimates out quickly, even if they have to be adjusted later. So I wouldn’t take any figure above as final. Still, I don’t expect the big picture to change significantly.

For newspapers, it is all part of a long, sad story. While some 100,000 industry jobs vanished between 1990 and 2007, the period since the Great Recession saw an acceleration of losses. This regularly updated graphic of mine, which captures this acceleration, has been getting some attention lately! In my latest refresh, I’ve added a color scheme keyed to the values in the data, though I’m still a bit agnostic on it:

After running the numbers and updating my charts, I sought reactions by email from several experts on the newspaper industry.

“These data tell an indisputable story about the ongoing decline of journalism,” said Victor Pickard, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the 2020 book Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society.

“I think these losses highlight the precarity of the newspaper industry in the United States,” added Zach Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project at the Medill School at Northwestern University.

“Beyond some of the high profile layoffs at places like the Washington Post, this past year we have also seen an increasing number of independent, smaller papers go out of business, which could be driving these job losses,” Metzger continued. “These independent papers are also small businesses, and the economic uncertainties of 2025 made it a particularly difficult year to run a small business—or a small newspaper.”

A first full year of tracking newspaper jobs at ReportEarth

I started this Substack nearly a year ago with a piece about 2024’s newspaper job losses. Consider this the next annual update. This trend had concerned me for a while, of course. But as I shifted to work in academia, and started to teach journalism, I found it increasingly important to get a handle on the data and visualize it in the context of my various talks and lectures.

That led to a different graphic that I published here for the first time in March 2025 and also have updated every month since, showing that other print industries, such as magazine publishing, have also been in decline. Just not to the degree seen by newspapers.

Since 1990, when there were over 450,000 jobs at U.S. newspapers, employment in the industry has shrunken by an astonishing 82 percent.

The weakening of the Washington Post affects the national conversation. But most papers are regional or local and centrally provide a different kind of service. They tell people what is happening in their communities and with the governments they live closer to (and pay taxes to). We’re talking about the governments involved in maintaining roads, picking up trash, regulating housing, maintaining a police force, managing public schools, and much else.

A number of scholars have made the Jeffersonian argument that the weakening or loss of these local papers is a blow to democracy itself. It makes it harder for people to know what’s happening around them, to accurately evaluate their local leaders, to spot corruption, and more.

“A slow-moving crisis like this is never going to get as much attention as Jeff Bezos firing a bunch of foreign correspondents,” said Danny Hayes, a professor at George Washington University and co-author (with Jennifer Lawless) of the 2021 book News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement.

“But in many ways it’s way more consequential,” Hayes continued. “For every reporter that gets laid off from a local newspaper, that community loses an untold number of stories about city hall, the mayor’s office, and local schools. It’s hard to quantify the effect, but it’s easy to know that it’s bad for civic life.”

Saving local news

Hayes did point to a few bright spots for the industry. Namely: The news business is getting help from some local governments, and nonprofit news models are showing at least some success.

The office building of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, whose owners recently announced its closure. Photo taken in 2019 by Tony Webster, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

In the first category, Illinois has been giving local newspapers tax credits for hiring or retaining journalists. An early look at this new program (hat tip to the Nieman Lab) suggests it has been working, with more than $ 4 million in tax credits given out last year, in support of the continuing employment or new hires of over 250 journalists.

And then there’s the fairly predictable financial move: Reconstitute newsgathering and reporting under a nonprofit framework, and thus insulate it from so many of the economic forces that have proved so devastating.

Hayes recently published a paper in the journal Journalism looking at how this approach is supporting local news. He conducted surveys in 3 states — New Hampshire, Montana, Michigan — where prominent, statewide non-profit news outlets have been in operation for some time. (They are New Hampshire Public Radio, Montana Free Press, and Bridge Michigan.) Here’s his conclusion:

I find that the reach of non-profit outlets in each state varies, but that their audiences are modest in size and made up of residents highly interested in public affairs…nonprofit outlets have the potential to make up for some of what has been lost in the local news crisis, but their ability to do so on a large scale depends on expanding their audiences.

To me (and clearly, to Hayes), this is pretty mixed news. For instance, in Michigan, only 18 percent of respondents said they got news on a regular basis from the nonprofit source, Bridge Michigan, which has been around since 2011.

For Victor Pickard of the Annenberg School at UPenn, it’s important to keep it all in context.

“There may be small rays of hope through the wreckage — a new start up here and there, increasing policy interventions at the state and local levels that bolster local media, a growing (but still insufficient) awareness that no commercial future exists for many forms of essential journalism — but the bigger picture remains decidedly grim,” Pickard said in his comment on the latest data.

Besides policy and financial restructuring, though, there is another key need: innovation. In other words, finding ways to retain the core values of a newspaper, while reaching audiences in the new ways that are obviously necessary today.

What that looks like is a much longer discussion. But the future of the newspaper will remain a core topic here going forward, so I hope I can do my part to host it. After all, in early 2026, we learned both of the Post layoffs and the full closure of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. While pinpointing an exact number is hard, my reading suggests these events mean a possible combined loss of 500 or more jobs that are not taken into account above. The trend only continues.

Finding any way to slow it down is increasingly urgent.