The Largest 1% of Outlets Employ 30.4% of Journalists

The finding

The largest 1% of news outlets — 107 outlets — account for 30.4% of every journalist in our database. The top 5% account for 57.2%, and the top 10% for 68.5%. The single largest newsroom holds 743 reachable staff; the median outlet holds one.

The distribution

The mean outlet has 3.7 journalists. The median has two. When a mean sits five times above its median, the average is describing a shape that does not exist.

The trap this sets

Media lists are usually sold and judged by contact count, which rewards depth at large outlets. Adding one national newspaper can add several hundred names. Adding a hundred regional titles might add a hundred and twenty.

But the hundred regional titles are a hundred independent editorial decisions, and the national newspaper is mostly one. A list that looks twice the size can represent a fraction of the chances of being published.

This is why headline contact counts are a poor way to compare media databases. The number that predicts coverage is how many distinct outlets you can reach, not how many individual inboxes.

What to do about it

• Count outlets, not contacts, when you size a campaign.
• Pitch one person per outlet. Six people at the same title is one decision and six annoyances.
• Weight the long tail if your goal is volume of coverage rather than a single marquee placement.
• Treat large newsrooms as specialist targets, chosen individually by what each journalist actually covers.

What the median outlet actually looks like

Strip out the top decile and the picture of the news industry changes completely. The typical outlet in this database is not a newspaper with sections. It is a trade title, a regional publication, a specialist newsletter or a local broadcaster, staffed by one or two people and covering a defined subject for a defined audience.

These outlets are systematically undervalued in PR planning because their audiences are small in absolute terms. But the audience of a trade title is composed almost entirely of people who work in that trade, which for most B2B announcements is a substantially better match than a national title read by millions who do not.

They are also more reachable. A single journalist covering a specific subject has an obvious interest in hearing about developments in it, and receives far fewer pitches than a national newsdesk. The response rates reflect that.

The concentration statistic is therefore less a fact about the industry than an instruction about where to spend effort.

Methodology

These figures come from the 38,872 published journalist records in the Media List database, spread across 10,639 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.

Source for the figures on this page: Media List media database statistics, which is generated from the live database and carries the date each figure was last read.

How this was measured, and when

Every figure on this page was re-run against the live database on October 20, 2026. The counts move as the database grows and as addresses are rechecked, so a figure here is a reading on a date rather than a fixed fact. When this study was first published the same set was smaller, which is why these percentages differ from the ones it originally carried. Each one is reproducible from the filters described above.

What concentration changes about a list

The 33 largest outlets are the ones every list starts with, and they are also the ones every competitor pitches. The long tail is where a specific story usually lands, because a small outlet that covers your exact topic has more reason to run it than a national desk that covers everything. Build by beat and you get both. Build by masthead size and you get a list of the same 33 newsrooms that everyone else emailed this morning.