Journalism Statistics (2026): What PR Pros Should Know

Northwestern’s Medill Local News Initiative released its 2026 State of Local News report on October 13, and the headline number is 238: the count of US counties that now have no local news source at all. That is 26 more news deserts than a year earlier, the largest single-year jump since Medill started tracking them county by county. If you pitch for a living, that figure is not an abstract industry problem. It is a shorter list of people who can say yes to you.

This roundup pulls the journalism statistics that matter most for PR work in 2026, each tied to a named source and edition. Where a newer edition exists, I used it. At the end, the numbers get compressed into one scorecard you can use before your next pitch.

Newsroom jobs keep shrinking, and the decline is now official forecast

Start with the federal baseline. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 47,100 jobs for reporters, correspondents, and broadcast news analysts in 2025. Its Occupational Outlook Handbook projects that number to fall 6% between 2025 and 2035, a loss of about 2,800 positions, even as the agency expects about 3,400 openings a year from people retiring or leaving the field. Those openings are replacement churn, not growth.

The longer view is harsher. Pew Research Center’s analysis of BLS data found US newsroom employment fell about 26% between 2008 and 2020, from about 114,000 workers to about 85,000. Newspapers took the worst of it: newspaper newsroom jobs dropped 57% over the same span, from about 71,000 to 31,000. Digital-native outlets grew 144% in that period, but from a base of only 7,400 people, so they never came close to filling the hole.

Layoff trackers show the bleeding has slowed but not stopped. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks announced job cuts by industry, recorded 2,254 cuts in news during 2025, down 54% from 4,902 in 2024. The broader media category moved the other way, with 17,163 announced cuts in 2025, up 15% year over year. Press Gazette’s running tally of journalism redundancies in the UK and US put 2025 at a minimum of 3,444 jobs, based on company announcements and media reports.

The practical read for PR people is simple. The reporter you pitched last spring may be gone, and their replacement may be covering three beats.

How many local news deserts are there now?

Medill’s 2026 report counts 238 news desert counties, defined as counties with no local news outlet. The same report found the country lost 170 newspapers in the past year through closures and mergers. For comparison, Medill’s 2025 edition recorded 136 closures, which already worked out to more than two papers a week.

The 2025 edition supplies the wider context that the 2026 coverage did not restate. In that report, Medill estimated about 50 million Americans had limited or no access to local news, and another 1,524 counties had only one remaining local source, usually a weekly paper. Medill also found newspaper employment fell 7% in a single year and that the industry has lost more than three-quarters of its jobs since 2005. Traffic to the 100 largest newspapers dropped more than 45% over four years, according to the Comscore data Medill cited.

There is a counterweight. The 2025 report counted more than 300 local news startups launched in the previous five years, about 80% of them digital-only. These startups are small and often grateful for a well-sourced local angle, but they cluster in metro areas, not in the rural counties where deserts spread fastest.

If your client’s story is local, the outlet you used to rely on might be gone. Check that the paper still publishes, and still has a reporter, before you build a regional media list around it.

Trust in news is low, and the phone is where people read it

Gallup has asked Americans about their trust in the mass media since the 1970s. Its September 2026 survey, fielded September 1 to 17, found 33% trust the media a great deal or a fair amount. That is up from 28% in 2025, which was the lowest figure Gallup had ever recorded, though Gallup’s own margin of error is plus or minus 4 points, so the bounce is modest. Another 33% said they have no trust at all. The partisan split is wide: 50% of Democrats expressed trust in 2026, compared with 22% of Republicans and 31% of independents. In 1972, the overall figure was 68%.

The global picture lines up. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, which surveyed close to 100,000 people across 48 markets, found 37% trust most news most of the time, the lowest level since the study began measuring in 2015. Interest is fading too. Reuters reported that 42% of respondents often or sometimes avoid the news.

Now the device question. Pew Research Center’s news platform fact sheet, based on an August 2025 survey, found 86% of US adults get news at least sometimes from a smartphone, computer, or tablet. Television was at 64%, radio at 44%, and print at 25%. When Pew asked which platform people prefer, TV still led at 34%, news websites and apps were at 21%, and social media came in at 14%.

Low trust plus phone-first reading changes what a placement is worth. A story now gets judged by a skeptical reader on a small screen, often after a social share stripped away the masthead.

Social and video now outrank the homepage

The most quoted finding in the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026 is a crossover. For the first time, more people across its markets said they access online news through social media and video networks (54%) than through news organizations’ own websites and apps (51%). That gap is small, but the direction has held for years.

Video drives most of it. Reuters found 77% of respondents watch online news video each week, and in 45 of 48 markets more people watch online news video than broadcast TV news. By platform, Facebook was used for news by 43%, YouTube by 34%, Instagram by 26%, and TikTok by 20%.

Creators sit inside that shift. Reuters found 27% get news from news-focused creators or influencers. In the US, Pew Research Center’s 2024 study of news influencers found 21% of adults regularly get news from them, rising to 37% among adults under 30. Pew also found 77% of those influencers have no affiliation or background with a news organization.

Publishers know what this means for them. The Reuters Institute’s Journalism, Media and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 survey of 280 media leaders in 51 countries found they expect search referrals to fall about 43% over the next three years. Chartbeat data cited in that report showed Google search traffic to more than 2,500 news sites fell 33% year over year. And 76% of those leaders said they plan to push their own staff to behave more like creators.

For PR, this argues for pitching stories that work as video or as a creator segment, not only as text.

AI in newsrooms: nearly universal use, thin trust

Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2026, which surveyed 1,044 journalists between January 30 and March 2, 2026 and kept 897 responses after quality checks, found 82% use at least one AI tool, up from 77% in the 2025 edition. ChatGPT led at 47%. Gemini rose from 13% to 22%, Claude from 6% to 12%, and transcription tools held at 40%. At the same time, the share of journalists worried about unchecked AI rose from 18% to 26%.

Journalists are less enthusiastic about AI coming from the PR side. Cision’s 2026 State of the Media report, based on 1,899 journalists across 19 markets, found 53% oppose AI-generated pitches, citing accuracy and personalization.

Readers are also cautious. Pew Research Center’s August 2025 survey found only 9% of US adults get news from AI chatbots often or sometimes, while 75% never do. Among those who do, about half said they at least sometimes see news there they believe is inaccurate. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026 put weekly chatbot use for news at 10% across markets, up from 7% a year earlier.

Inside newsrooms, the efficiency story has not arrived. In the Reuters Institute trends survey, 67% of media leaders said AI had not saved any jobs so far.

So use AI to research a reporter, and write the pitch yourself. A reporter who runs every inbound email through the same tools you do will spot the template.

Pitch volume and workload: the inbox math

Here is the uncomfortable part for anyone who sends pitches. Muck Rack’s 2026 survey found 86% of journalists say at least some of their stories originate from a PR pitch. That is the good news. The rest is less kind: 88% immediately disregard pitches that miss their beat, and nearly half say they seldom receive pitches that match their coverage. In Muck Rack’s 2025 edition, most journalists reported receiving more than five pitches per day, and only 3% said pitches always matched what they cover.

Cision’s 2026 data sharpens the relevance problem. It found 72% of journalists say fewer than a quarter of the pitches they get are relevant. Yet 66% rely on PR-provided content, such as press releases, pitches, and media kits, for story ideas. Reporters need PR. They just need far less of what most PR people send.

The workload behind those numbers is heavy. Cision found 49% of journalists name shrinking budgets, staff cuts, and heavier workloads as their biggest obstacles. Muck Rack’s 2025 survey found 62% took on more tasks that year, and 47% described their work as exhausting. In the 2026 edition, 65% still called the work meaningful, and nearly half again used the word exhausting.

What earns attention is specific. Muck Rack’s 2026 respondents said a pitch feels relevant when it affects their audience’s community (78%), and they named clear beat fit, access to sources, original research or data, and high-resolution images as the most valuable pitch elements. Our breakdown of what journalists actually want from PR goes deeper on each of those.

What do journalists earn compared with PR people?

Pay explains part of the imbalance. The BLS reported a median annual wage of $62,200 for reporters, correspondents, and broadcast news analysts in May 2025. For public relations specialists, the median was $74,750 in the same period. That is a gap of $12,550 a year in favor of the people doing the pitching.

The job counts diverge even more. BLS counted 314,500 public relations specialist jobs in 2025, against 47,100 reporter and correspondent jobs. Its projections run in opposite directions, too: 2% growth for PR specialists from 2025 to 2035, and a 6% decline for reporters.

Divide one by the other and you get about 6.7 PR specialists for every reporter in the BLS data. That ratio understates the real crowd, because the BLS reporter count leaves out editors and producers who also field pitches, while the PR count leaves out marketers, founders, and agencies’ account staff who send pitches without the PR title. Treat 6.7 as a floor for competition, not a precise census.

Lower pay also drives turnover. Muck Rack’s 2025 survey found more than one-third of journalists self-publish outside a traditional newsroom, and 61% of those earn income from it. The reporter you need may now run a newsletter on the side.

The 3R Pitch Read: turning these journalism statistics into a scorecard

Raw numbers do not tell you what to do on Monday. So I compress the journalism statistics above into three ratios I call the 3R Pitch Read: Ratio, Relevance, and Reliance. Each one answers a single question about your odds before you send anything.

Read the three together. Ratio is the headwind, and you cannot change it. Relevance is where most of your competition fails, which means it is where you win. Reliance is the proof that the channel still works, so the answer to a crowded inbox is not to stop pitching but to send fewer, sharper pitches.

To score a pitch, ask three things. Is this one of the few pitches this reporter will get today that fits the exact beat they covered in the last 30 days? Does it give them something the 88% filter cannot dismiss, such as original data, a named source, or a local angle for their audience? And is it something they would rely on, meaning usable as written without a second round of reporting just to confirm the basics? A pitch that clears all three is rare enough to stand out.

What should PR people do with these numbers?

First, shrink your lists. With 238 news desert counties and a reporter workforce headed down another 6%, a list of 200 contacts built two years ago is full of empty desks and reassigned beats. A list of 20 reporters who covered your topic in the last month will outperform it. Our guide on how to pitch journalists and get replies walks through that research step.

Second, bring material a thin newsroom cannot produce alone. Original data is the obvious example, and it matches what Muck Rack’s respondents ask for. A short survey, a proprietary dataset, or a clean analysis of public records gives an overstretched reporter a story they did not have the hours to build. The press release statistics for 2026 show the same pattern on the release side.

Third, build for the screen. Reuters found social and video access has passed direct visits to news sites, and Pew found 86% of Americans get news on digital devices. Offer a spokesperson who is good on camera, a visual that reads on a phone, and a version of the story a creator could tell in 60 seconds.

Fourth, assume your placement will travel without its masthead. With trust at 33% in Gallup’s 2026 data and 37% in the Reuters Institute’s, the reader is skeptical by default. Claims need sources, and the client’s own site should back up what the coverage says.

The next twelve months will reward the PR teams that pitch like the reporter’s workload is their problem too, because in a newsroom with fewer people and more inboxes, it is.