2005 Annual Report - Newspaper Newsroom Investment

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Rick Edmonds of The Poynter Institute

On balance, 2004 was another discouraging year for editors hoping to rebuild the capacity of their newsrooms or citizens hoping to see broad improvements in the quality of their local newspapers.

Newsroom employment actually fell by 500 full-time professionals in 2003, or about 1%, to 54,200. That cancelled out a small gain in 2002, and returned to levels below 2001, when employment fell by 2,000 - or about 4% in a single year.¹ Firm information on 2004 staffing or newsroom budgets is not available, but anecdotally it appears to have been a year of hold-downs and scattered cuts. More of the same seems likely in 2005.

There is good news in the number of minorities working in newsroom. While the overall number of staff members was down, the number of minority newsroom employees rose to 7,000, or about 13% of the total. Both of those numbers are the highest they have been.²

Newspaper Newsroom Work Force

1978-2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: American Society of Newspaper Editors, Newsroom Employment Census, 2004

Minorities include Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans.

For chains, Gannett comes closest to matching the diversity of its community, followed by Knight Ridder, McClatchy and the New York Times Company.³

At the same time, newsrooms saw a slight increase in the number of women. In 2003, women constituted 37% of the newsroom workforce. Among supervisors, 34% were female, as were 40% of reporters.⁴

The first prominent cut was the reduction of 60 newsroom jobs at the Los Angeles Times in early summer 2004. Ironically it came just months after the Times won five Pulitzer Prizes. Tribune Company executives cited soft performance in the L.A. ad market. Earlier in the year, another Tribune Co. paper, The Baltimore Sun, dismissed its editor, William Marimow, noting conflicts but not specifying whether they were over newsroom resources. He ended up a managing editor at National Public Radio, recipient of a huge grant from the estate of Joan Kroc to expand news operations. The Washington Post completed a buyout program that resulted in the phased early retirement of many familiar bylines (though like the L.A Times, The Post retains an enormous and highly qualified staff).

In autumn the other shoe dropped for two of the circulation-scandal papers. The Dallas Morning News announced it was downsizing the newsroom by 60 positions, and Newsday announced in mid-November that up to 110 jobs would have to be eliminated through voluntary and involuntary buyouts.⁵ The Houston Chronicle announced cuts, and others were in prospect at other Tribune Company papers. Jack Fuller, the Pulitzer Prize winner who had run Tribune's newspaper division for a number of years, took early retirement.

Other cuts came primarily from formal or informal job freezes and attrition. (This was the case at Knight-Ridder, for instance.) These cuts were not anything like the shocking wave of deep cuts experienced in 2001, which reached roughly 10% at Knight-Ridder papers alone.⁶ It certainly is possible that other papers were expanding staff unannounced, but the probable net reduction in industry staff will not become more apparent until April 2005, when ASNE releases its annual census, reflecting end-of-2004 staffing levels.