Underrepresented journalists most impacted by layoffs, says new report
The Institute for Independent Journalists report is an effort toward filling the data gap left behind by the News Leaders Association’s shuttered diversity census.
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Layoffs in journalism since 2022 have disproportionately impacted people of marginalized genders and people of color, according to a new report from the Institute of Independent Journalists (IIJ). It collects data from a survey with 176 journalist respondents who had undergone a layoff or buyout since 2022.
Among the findings:
- 42% of respondents are people of color, and were proportionally overrepresented in the survey compared to the industry at large (17% of the industry is journalists of color, per Pew Research Center survey data).
- 73% of respondents are a marginalized gender (68% were women, 5% nonbinary), and were similarly overrepresented in the survey (women comprise 46% of the journalism industry).
- 70% of respondents were between 26 and 45.
- 52% of respondents had been in their job for less than 3 years.
Founded in 2022 to support freelance journalists of color, the IIJ says it “undertook this project to shine light on the populations most impacted by news layoffs.” The data in the report was collected from December 2023 to September 2024.
IIJ founder Katherine Reynolds Lewis added that the foundation’s report aims to “capture the human cost of layoffs on journalists, as well as the impact on newsroom talent.” The number of journalism job cuts by this September (3,402) already surpasses the total number of layoffs in all of last year (3,087), according to outplacement firm Challenger, Grey & Christmas — and the report comes after layoffs announced this month at Resolve Philly and ABC News.
With scarce information on demographics and experience of laid-off journalists, the survey is also one effort to fill the data gap created by the collapse of the News Leaders Association’s (NLA) annual diversity census, with 2019 the last year for which data is available. NLA dissolved this year, and the diversity census saw newsroom participation routinely decline even while active.
The IIJ Foundation survey also adds more context to the picture created by the 2020 Leavers survey of journalists of color conducted by Carla Murphy and published by the Online News Association. The most common “Leaver”, among other demographics, was between 27-44 when they quit journalism — an age range that fits the majority of the layoff-affected IIJ survey respondents.
Forty-year-old respondent María Inés Zamudio, a Chicago-based investigative journalist, lost her job in the Center for Public Integrity’s mass layoff in May. She’s worked as a journalist since 2007, but told Lewis that the layoff has made her realize “the extra hours of work and strategy that went into publishing investigations that changed people’s lives doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to job stability.”
“I just don’t know if I’ll survive in this industry,” Zamudio said.
The full report can be read on the IIJ website. The foundation, which has been tracking layoff announcements since last January, is still accepting accounts from journalists who experienced layoffs or buyouts at census@theiij.com or through its survey Google form.
James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective and the podcast producer for The Sick Times.
This piece was edited and copy edited by Gabe Schneider.
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