ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the size of the journalistic workforce in the United States in 1992 compared with earlier years, the geographic dispersion of US journalists, their age and gender, their ethnic and religious origins, their political views, and their media use patterns. Our estimates of US journalistic employment do not include part-time correspondents, freelancers, or stringers working on an occasional basis, although their numbers seem to have increased during the 1980s, especially in radio. Our estimates are subject to varying amounts of sampling error because they were based on different sized random samples of news organizations in relation to their actual numbers. The drop of nearly eight percentage points in the two youngest age categories for journalists can be explained by the negligible growth in journalism during the 1980s, and by the fact that the US civilian labor force under 24 years of age also declined as a relative percentage by five percentage points.
