46% of News Outlets Have Exactly One Journalist You Can Reach

The finding

Of 2,993 news outlets in our database, 1,381 — 46.1% — have exactly one journalist you can reach. 73.3% have four or fewer. The mental image of a newsroom as a floor of desks describes a small minority of the outlets that will ever cover you.

For most publications, there is one person. They choose the stories, write them, edit them, post them, and read the pitches.

The shape of the industry

Those 2,193 small outlets — nearly three quarters of everything — account for just 12.1% of all journalists. The people are concentrated in a handful of large newsrooms; the outlets are not.

What this changes about pitching

A pitch to a one-person newsroom is read by the person who decides. There is no assignment desk, no section editor, no filtering layer. That is the good news, and it is a genuine structural advantage over pitching a large title.

The bad news is the same fact from the other side. That person is doing five jobs, and a pitch that requires work — chasing an image, requesting a quote, confirming a figure — is a pitch that loses to one that does not. At a large outlet, someone might do that work. Here, nobody will.

The practical consequence is that completeness beats persuasion. A pitch containing the quote, the image and the figure can be published as it stands. A pitch that promises to send them on request usually is not.

What to do about it

• Send the assets, do not offer them. Attach or link the image and the numbers in the first email.
• Include a usable quote already cleared for publication and correctly attributed.
• Write short. One person clearing an inbox between deadlines reads the first three lines.
• Do not ask for a call as the first step. Ask nothing; give something.

What this means for building a list

Most media lists are assembled by seniority: find the editors, prioritise the biggest names, work down. On this distribution that method quietly does the wrong thing, because it over-samples the large newsrooms where a title tells you least about who decides.

At an outlet with one journalist there is no seniority question to answer. At an outlet with three hundred, a title such as editor could mean the person who runs the newspaper or the person who subedits one section, and cold mail to the first is close to wasted.

A more reliable method is to build by outlet first and person second. Decide which publications reaching your audience matter, then find the single most appropriate person at each — which for the majority of outlets is not a decision at all, because there is one.

The resulting list is smaller and converts better, and it is far easier to personalise, because a list of two hundred outlets can be written to individually in a way that a list of two thousand names cannot.

Methodology

These figures come from the 29,083 published journalist records in the Media List database, spread across 2,993 news outlets, measured on 15 August 2026.

Only published records are counted — the ones a customer can actually reach. Deliverability states are supplied by third-party address verification and reflect the most recent check on each address. Outlet size means the number of journalists we hold at that outlet, which is a floor on its real newsroom headcount rather than an exact count.

You are welcome to cite these findings with attribution to Media List.