The New York-ification of Media Keeps Growing, Warts and All

Why has New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani become nationally prominent so quickly? Part of it has to do with his bold and controversial policy proposals, his undeniable political skills and his wholehearted embrace of social media. But it can't hurt that there are so many journalists in New York to write and talk about his exploits and so few following the mayors of most other US cities.

The nation's media capital is in many ways far less central to the national conversation than it used to be, with TikTok, YouTube, Substack, artificial-intelligence chatbots and other new modes of communication sucking up so much of Americans' time and attention. Yet in the production of certain kinds of media - journalism in particular - New York is more dominant than ever.

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.

This juxtaposition explains a lot about our fraught, distrust-filled media environment. Americans in most of the country are much less likely to have personal contact with working journalists than was the case 25 years ago, while the journalists who remain are increasingly concentrated in a city that, while wonderful, is utterly different from most of the rest of the country. Those working at long-established New York-based media companies continue to feel besieged by the rise of new media, but for those on the outside looking in, these organizations still seem to wield great political and cultural power without real accountability.

At times it can feel as if this is all just an interregnum before the final collapse of the New York media establishment, but I wonder about that. Before the internet, the US media landscape was less centralized than that of most other countries as local newspaper monopolies brought in enough advertising revenue to finance large newsgathering operations, and a new entertainment powerhouse arose in the 20th century nearly 3,000 miles away from the old one. In a media environment where it's possible to reach an audience of millions from one's basement, it can seem as if geography is irrelevant, but voluminous economic research on other industries has found big productivity benefits to the clustering of talent that probably apply to media, too. Some geographical concentration may be inevitable.

Inevitable or not, it has certainly been happening over the past couple of decades, with falling ad revenue at local newspaper monopolies driving the most drastic shift. Employment at newspapers has collapsed in the US, even if you throw in online-only news operations, as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has since 2022. But while it's down in New York, too, it certainly hasn't collapsed.

I count only Manhattan newspaper jobs because the numbers for the other four boroughs aren't available for every year and aren't very big. These statistics from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages are based on state unemployment-insurance records and sorted by where the employer is situated - my impression is that most journalists employed in Manhattan actually live in Brooklyn, Queens and the New Jersey suburbs. Transforming the numbers in the above chart into Manhattan's share of US newspaper employment makes clearer just how much New York has been swimming against the national tide.

Manhattan is home to 0.5% of the US population, and New York City accounts for 2.5%, so the borough's 8.3% share of newspaper jobs in 2025 is disproportionate if not exactly overwhelming. When you consider that most newspaper journalists outside the city are writing for local audiences and the only truly successful national newspapers - the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal - are based in Manhattan, its share of influence on the national discourse is surely greater than that.

Manhattan's share of US employment in periodical and book publishing is even greater but hasn't changed much since the arrival of the internet. Both industries have been shrinking nationally, albeit slower than newspapers. (The US employment decline from 2000 to 2025 was 80% for newspapers, 64% for periodicals and 39% for books.)

It's a little hard to say whether broadcasting employment has declined. Legacy television and radio networks and stations definitely employ fewer people than they used to, but producing audio and video content and sharing it with large audiences - which is what broadcasting is, right? - possibly employs more.

Since the 1990s, the internet has been posing definitional challenges for the US, Canadian and Mexican government statisticians who manage the North American Industry Classification System used in jobs reports and other economic data. For a long time, they dealt with these challenges by segregating out internet publishing and broadcasting" and then "internet publishing and web search portals" from the traditional media categories. In 2022, the walls finally came tumbling down.

In publishing, this change seems to have boosted Manhattan's share of newspaper employment, but it hasn't brought large national employment changes for newspapers, periodicals or books. The updated category of "broadcasting and content providers," by contrast, has swept in some of the internet's giants in a subcategory called "media streaming distribution services, social networks and other media networks and content providers," which now employs more people than non-internet broadcasting ever did. Interestingly, this redefinition appears to have caused Manhattan's broadcasting employment share to grow while providing less of a boost to the other broadcasting superpower, Los Angeles County.

I don't know whether AI researchers at Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. really ought to count as broadcasting employees - my reading of the current industry categories is that they do; out of concerns about confidentiality of the data, the BLS won't say where any particular employer falls. It's clear, though, that Manhattan continues to play an outsized role in the industry.

Manhattan also claims an outsized 12.6% of US employment in the new category of "web search portals, libraries, archives and other information services," which likely encompasses most of Google parent Alphabet Inc. as well as Bloomberg LP, the publisher of this opinion column. In this, Manhattan probably ranks second to California's Santa Clara County, where Alphabet is based, but the BLS hasn't released Santa Clara County's jobs numbers for the category for several years, presumably because they're too easily traceable to a single employer.

The BLS does offer an alternative to these ever-shifting industry categories - the estimates of employment by occupation contained in its annual Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. One of those occupational categories has been called "news analysts, reporters and journalists" since 2019 and "news analysts, reporters and correspondents" before then. This does not appear to have been a substantive change, and the category seems to be the best measure available of journalism employment in the US. (There is a separate category for editors, many of whom don't work in journalism, and another for TV and radio announcers.) You may have seen a version of this chart comparing journalists' employment trajectory over the past quarter century with that of "public relations specialists."

The 40% decline in news analyst, reporter and journalist employment since 2000 is at least less precipitous than the 80% decline in newspaper employment. The actual decline in journalism employment may have been even smaller than that, given the rise of Substack and similar platforms and the fact that the self-employed aren't included in any of the statistics cited in this article. Then again, 25 years ago it was possible to make a more-than-decent living as a freelance magazine writer and now it really isn't, which may cancel out some or all of the Substack effect.

These statistics are also available by metropolitan statistical area, and while there are reasons to be somewhat wary of these numbers, they tell a story about New York's growing role not all that different from the one found in the industry data. I've also included the Washington metro area, which is the No. 2 employer of journalists outside metro New York and whose share of US journalism employment has grown.

The main reason to be wary of these metro area data is that while the survey they're based on is quite large at a national level (about 1.1 million employment establishments are surveyed over rolling three-year periods), the metro-area slices are of course much smaller and thus more subject to measurement error as well as data being suppressed to preserve confidentiality. Before 2018, the BLS also broke down large metro areas into smaller parts in reporting the data, which aggravated both of those issues. With those caveats in mind, here's a rundown of metro areas with 500 or more journalism jobs, of which I counted 20 in 2020 and just 10 in 2025.

By this measure, more journalists were working in metro New York in 2025 than in 2000. Washington's number fell, but not by much as news organizations continued to prioritize reporting on national politics. Also holding up pretty well were Atlanta, home of CNN, and San Francisco, where journalists congregate to report on the corporations that have disrupted journalism. In other big cities, the declines have been staggering, with metro Philadelphia going from 1,800 to 460 such jobs and Chicago from 1,700 to 660. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chicago Tribune could once afford to maintain networks of foreign correspondents around the world. Now they struggle to cover their own cities' suburbs.

The internet has offered new windows onto the world that partly compensate for this decline, from social media contributions from around the globe to YouTube videos of local government meetings. Still, full-time journalists working for news organizations continue to play an essential role in finding things out and explaining them, and with so many of them in New York, that means more Zohran-Mamdani-related content than is probably optimal. There, I've just created some more.

Justin Fox is a columnist writing about business. Prior to joining Bloomberg View, he was the editorial director of the Harvard Business Review. He is the author of "The Myth of the Rational Market."

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Previously:
• 01/05/26: The US-born employment and population boom that wasn't
• 09/05/25: Will AI make lawyers richer or put them out of work?
• 04/09/25: If cameras don't slow serial speeders, 'limiters' can
• 03/16/22: If cameras don't slow serial speeders, 'limiters' can
• 11/22/21: Grown kids still stuck at home? Change is on the horizon
• 10/28/21: Fewer people going to college is good news
• 07/06/20: GET READY: This new coronavirus wave isn't like the old wave
• 01/16/20: Understanding the 'war on men' in the workplace
• 01/09/18: Why some cities get all the good jobs
• 01/04/18: If you want to 'change the world,' keep it to yourself
• 01/04/18: If you want to know the future, ask the humorists
• 12/04/15: What good retirement plans everywhere have in common
• 11/27/15: Sorry, you lost the right to have your day in court
• 07/01/15: Uber Is Lobbying for All of Us