136 BBC journalists call themselves freelance in their headline, more than any other outlet

136 of the 3,935 BBC journalists in our base use the word freelance in their profile headline, the line under the name on a professional profile. No other outlet comes close on count. The Guardian is next with 33, then Deutsche Welle and the Danish broadcaster DR with 31 each. The New York Times has 23 of 2,168 rows.

Source: JournalistLabs, November 2026.

None of the 136 has freelance in the job title field. The title reads journalist, broadcast journalist, radio presenter or reporter, with the BBC as employer, and the headline says the work is freelance. We expected the BBC to lead on count because it is the largest outlet in the base. We did not expect the gap to the next outlet to be four to one.

Outlets with the most freelance headlines

On share the BBC is not first. The Guardian, DR and Deutsche Welle each have a higher rate, and ITN has 6.3%. The BBC's lead is a lead in numbers of people. Bloomberg has 6 freelance headlines in 1,785 rows and Reuters 6 in 710.

Britain against the United States

Freelance shows up more in British headlines across the board. 456 of the 12,094 rows in Britain say freelance, 3.8%. In the United States it is 900 of 69,377, 1.3%. 114 of the BBC's 136 are in Britain.

Which BBC jobs

Presenters have the highest rate. Sport is the most common beat among the 136, with 20 rows.

How we counted

The base is the 127,602 editorial rows we publish counts from, people data pulled from July to September 2026. We lowercased each profile headline and checked it for "freelance" as plain text, which also matches freelancer. A person who works freelance and does not say so in the headline is not counted, so these are floors. The headline text and the names are not published. Outlets with fewer than 40 rows are left out of the outlet file.