U.S. newspaper newsroom workforce

Consequently, as the newspaper industry declines, so does its workforce. The U.S. newspaper newsroom workforce has declined from its high point of 56,400 in 2000 to 40,600 in 2011, according to Pew’s “State of the News Media” study in 2013.

Sixty percent of the American public has heard little or nothing about the financial woes of the newspaper industry’s newsroom cutbacks, including 36 percent who have heard nothing at all and 24 percent who have heard little, according to Pew’s “State of the News Media” study in 2013. Meanwhile, of those Americans who have stopped turning to a news outlet, 60.7 percent said the stories are less complete and 23.5 percent said there were fewer stories.

American newspapers have executed strategies to address the challenge of fewer journalists and therefore fewer stories produced. For some newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune, a strategy with a tighter focus on investigative reporting and local reporting, and fewer stories that were commodities news was put in place. The Tribune also cut its ties with expensive news services, and uses its own Tribune “network” of content from the Los Angeles Times, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel.

The data set is a part of a collection of 500 revenue and usership trends in mobile, social, Internet, tablet, video and other digital categories, published in the 200-page Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. GDMT, in its eight year, is to be published by World Newsmedia Network, a not-for-profit media research company, in September 2013. To subscribe to the PDF report and/or the tablet edition, go to www.wnmn.org, or contact mstone@wnmn.org.