Ten years ago, I wrote a piece on how the internet was sucking journalistic resources out of the middle of the country and concentrating it on the coasts — primarily New York City. While digital publishing theoretically could have distributed reporters away from high-cost cities, in reality, it reduced the financial returns on local reporting and increased the physical distances between journalists and their audiences.
A lot’s happened to media in the ensuing decade — perhaps most notably, the pandemic-fueled rise in work-from-home arrangements that, again, could have reduced the number of journalists overpaying for a Brooklyn walkup. But Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has an interesting datapoint today that shows the concentration of media keeps on growing.
My measure of dominance is employment, which is incomplete and flawed but better than anything else available. Having looked into the centralization of media employment a decade ago, I was inspired to revisit the data by an online complaint (from Minneapolis) about “the New York-ification of Democratic politics.” What I found is that New York-ification of media has for the most part continued to grow even as media industries have continued to struggle.
Fox pulls labor data for a number of media professions, including magazines, book publishing, and broadcasting. But of most interest for our purposes is newspapers (a category which now also include digital-only publishers). In 2016, when I was writing about coastal concentration, 1 out of every 30 U.S. newspaper jobs (3.3%) were based in Manhattan. That was already up markedly from 1-in-48 jobs (2.1%) in 2000 — which was, roughly speaking, the final peak of the print newspaper business.
But that trend hasn’t retrenched in the years since — it’s accelerated. By 2025, 1 out of every 12 U.S. newspaper jobs (8.3%) was based in Manhattan. What was once one of America’s least centralized industries is increasingly squeezed into a few square miles of Midtown.
Check out the full post to see how the distribution of “news analysts, reporters and journalists” has become increasingly Acela-adjacent, along with other slices of contemporary media employment.
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