The NY Times “Wirecutter” staff:

Source

At the NY Times overall, 55% of staff are men and 45% are women.

2 out of 3 journalism students are women and it has been that way for a decade.

Employment in newsrooms has plummeted: Newsroom jobs and employment in the U.S.: 10 charts about the industry | Pew Research Center

One out of every 5 newsroom workers, is based in Washington, DC, New York City, or Los Angeles and 1 in 4 live in the northeastern U.S. 40% of those working for “online” news businesses, live in the northeast.

According to the US BLS, the median pay in journalism is about $49,000/year. At the Washington Post, the average pay is about $70k/year.

But college-educated newsroom employees tend to make less money than college-educated workers on the whole. The median earnings of newsroom employees with a college degree are about $52,000 a year, compared with roughly $61,000 for all college-educated workers.

Yet many of those entering the field attend private colleges with list prices of $60,000 to $80,000/year, and many then earn a Master’s in journalism at elite universities, where the list price is $100,000 to $125,000.

About 80% of newsroom staff have a college degree and 77% of those degrees are in the arts and humanities.

Compare the 77% of humanities degree holders to the overall population:

College-educated workers overall, by comparison, are much more likely than those working in newsrooms to have bachelor’s degrees in science, engineering and related fields (45% vs. 16%) and business (22% vs. 5%), as well as education (10% vs. 3%).

An estimated 11% of journalists have a Master’s degree.

For comparison,

• 16% of software engineers have a Master’s degree,
• 19% of those with a computer science degree have a Master’s degree
• 14% of all engineers have a Master’s degree,
• Women are more likely than men to hold a Master’s degree (suspect this is due to about 75% of K-12 teachers are women, about 90% of K-6 teachers are women, and about 90% of nurses are women – both fields employ millions and a Master’s degree is now common those fields, if not required.)