1% of News Outlets Employ 36.7% of Journalists

The finding

The largest 1% of news outlets — about 30 organisations — account for 36.7% of every journalist in our database. The top 5% account for 61.4%, and the top 10% for 73.1%. The single largest newsroom holds 1,301 reachable staff; the median outlet holds two.

The distribution

The mean outlet has 9.7 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 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.