Moneybox

Where the Journalism Jobs Are

Michael Mandel offers a great illustration of the continued relevance of location in the Internet age, showing that help-wanted ads for news analysts, reporters, and correspondents are highly concentrated in a handful of metropolitan areas.

It’s worth relativizing this to population, since the New York metro area is really big and tends to dominate statistical aggregates simply because of sheer scale. According to the 2010 Census, greater New York contains about 6.3 percent of the American population—No. 1, but far lower than the 15.5 percent of journalism job opportunities. Los Angeles has 4.1 percent of the population, so that’s also a disproportionate amount of journalism opportunities but less so than New York. D.C., by contrast, has only 1.8 percent of the total population in its metropolitan area but apparently 5.5 percent of the journalism jobs. So there are more aggregate opportunities in New York or L.A., but the journalism industry is a bigger share of the Washington economic pie.

The Philadelphia metro area, by contrast, is slightly larger than Washington but has many fewer journalism opportunities. What’s really striking, however, is that the big Texas metropolitan areas of Dallas and Houston—despite being fourth and fifth in total population, respectively—don’t make the top 10 list.