The lost newspaper jobs of 2024 — and so many years before that

Surveying the glum numbers for my former industry. And some slight rays of hope.

Newspaper line in Oakland, CA, on January 9, 2005. Photo by Kai Schreiber via Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Back in the late 1990s, when I was a college kid, I was already committed to pursuing a career as a writer. I was also starting to view journalism as a cool, glamorous field that I wanted to be a part of.

I had zero awareness of it then, but there were over 400,000 jobs of all types in the U.S. newspaper industry in that era, based on figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The change over my roughly 25-year career is incredible.

Last week, the big monthly jobs report from the Bureau came out, the one that makes the headlines. I doubt many people focus on the newspaper job figures buried in there. But I do.

There was a new, preliminary number for January 2025 — an estimated 87,000 newspaper jobs — and for December 2024, the number is now no longer preliminary. It’s 86,000. (All of these figures are seasonally adjusted.)

Both numbers represent a marked drop compared with a year earlier. The agency reports 92,600 jobs in December 2023 and 91,400 in January 2024, for instance. The overall picture is consistent with broader accounts of 2024 media job losses that also affected broadcast news and the entertainment industry.

2024 won’t go down as the worst year on record for jobs at newspapers. But the change has been profound over the decades — a roughly 80 percent decline, if you compare the annual average number of jobs in 1990 with the annual average number in 2024.

[Note: On 5/5, this chart was updated to include the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, which now run through March of 2025.]

“The numbers reflect what’s evident in newsrooms — continued cuts, shrinking staffs, and increasing strain on the journalists who remain,” Nick Mathews, a professor of journalism at the University of Missouri who focuses on local news and its challenges, told me in an email.

“As for whether this decline will slow, that’s harder to predict, but the pressures on local news remain significant,” Mathews added.

Understanding the numbers

The figure above plots newspaper jobs alongside those in the three other industries within the “Newspaper, periodical, book, and directory publishers” industry group. While there are certainly other ways of looking at media changes, this approach helps show that this is part of a broader technological change in how we receive information. Book and magazine publishers have also seen significant long-term job declines. People read words printed on paper less frequently than they used to.

But it is not just about technology — there’s also the consolidation of media ownership, Mathews points out, and an array of other factors. “This is the result of overlapping, technological and societal forces reshaping journalism,” he said.

Some of the biggest losses have been in local news. The Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, for instance, recently reported that there have been 3,200 print newspaper closures since the year 2005.

“A lot of beats have disappeared, and with the loss of jobs has come a pretty big reduction in the diversity and kinds of content that gets printed in newspapers,” said Zachary Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project at the Medill School.

To be sure, the numbers call for a few caveats. First, these are figures for all jobs, not just reporter or editor jobs. So they include jobs in advertising, printing, and so on. (It is possible to do a more detailed look using different data, but the punchline isn’t much different — see for instance here.)

Second, job losses have not been as large in other media sectors (like broadcast television). Finally, we know there has been some offsetting jobs growth in online-only publications, though it’s harder to pinpoint comparable numbers on that, at least using the same BLS dataset.

Jobs related to online publishing by newspapers and magazines — i.e., people employed to write for their websites — should be included in the figures above. But what about a journalist who ditched the old media and now makes a living as (say) a full-time Substack writer?

“Self-employed writers are not going to be included,” said Metzger, whose project often draws on BLS data, among multiple other sources.

That does underscore that there’s at least some room for optimism, in spite of these numbers.

There’s also, of course, that slight uptick of 1,000 jobs in January of this year, currently a preliminary figure. While I’m not sure how much to make of it yet, it may represent papers staffing up to cover the new Trump administration, which is following the previous iteration in generating news at a furious pace.

What it means for the climate beat

It doesn’t make you old-fashioned to suggest that these large-scale media changes also probably change how we think. There’s a big cognitive commitment involved in sitting down and physically reading a book or newspaper. It is a slow (in the Kahneman sense) and deliberative assimilation of information that’s just different from rapidly scrolling through social media posts.

These data thus have broad implications — and they certainly have a bearing on how we learn and think about climate change. Especially in local papers, the loss of journalist jobs means there may not even be someone dedicated to covering the subject.

“A lot of the traditional beats of newspapers, whether it’s environmental reporting, reporting on pollution, as well as beats like education, even town council stuff, a lot of those beats have disappeared or been consolidated,” said Metzger. “In many small papers, the only remaining dedicated beats are crime and sports.”

There is good evidence that despite the general loss of newspaper jobs, the volume of climate coverage has actually increased, especially at major papers (another of the scattered rays of hope in this post). The topic has just gotten a lot more prominent in the past decade or so. But, the increase in attention, while present, has not been as large at smaller papers, this study suggests.

In the end, these figures underscore an overwhelming trend in the media environment that must be grappled with and understood — but the work continues, often in new guises.

“While traditional newsroom jobs may be fewer, the demand for quality reporting remains,” Mathews said. “In fact, opportunities to build something new have never been greater.”

Thank you, subscribers!

This is my first significant post since launching ReportEarth with this brief intro:

Begin new voice now

Since a fair number of folks have joined us here in the interim, this seems like a good moment to give a little more sense of what I’m planning.

First, I’ll be doing a lot of writing and reporting based on data, much like what you see above. We’re talking about data that casts light both on science and climate communication, but also physical data about the Earth.

But it won’t all be data-focused posts — I’ll also be sharing my take on issues and trends as they emerge, as well as science communication tips, techniques, etc. I’ll often be asking for your thoughts and feedback. And, I may even attempt some longer form journalism (we’ll see).

I’ll continue to report and include relevant voices when I feel it fits — but, I’ll also give my view when I feel it fits.

All of this should, hopefully, translate into at least one item — and one email — a week, but there could be busier weeks. Hopefully, there won’t be many missed ones.

That’s the outlook for now — and thanks again for your support!

Correction: My apologies to Nick Mathews, whose name I spelled with a second ‘t’ in an earlier iteration of this post. This has been corrected.