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How many journalists are in the UK?
JournalistLabs, 2026-11-09
The Office for National Statistics Labour Force Survey puts the number of working journalists in the UK at nearly 100,000, as Press Gazette reported in May 2021 from an NCTJ analysis. Our base holds 12,094 editorial staff based in the United Kingdom, at 1,184 outlets. That is about one in eight of the survey figure.
Source: JournalistLabs, November 2026. Survey figure: Press Gazette, May 2021.
The two numbers count different things. The survey counts everyone who describes their job as journalism, freelancers included. Our rows are named people with a newsroom title at a news outlet, so they are a floor, not a census. The 12,094 are 9.5% of the 127,602 rows in the whole base, second only to the US. The UK country page has the beat split.
UK editorial staff by role
| Role | Rows | Share of 12,094 |
|---|---|---|
| Editors | 6,085 | 50.3% |
| Reporters | 3,479 | 28.8% |
| Anchors and presenters | 1,023 | 8.5% |
| Correspondents | 673 | 5.6% |
| Other editorial | 501 | 4.1% |
| Columnists | 157 | 1.3% |
| Critics and reviewers | 111 | 0.9% |
| News producers | 65 | 0.5% |
Source: JournalistLabs, November 2026.
Half of the UK rows are editors. That is 1.75 editors per reporter, against 1.31 in our US count. The BBC pulls the other way: its 3,074 UK rows hold 1,430 reporters and 869 editors. Take the BBC out and the rest of the UK has 5,216 editors and 2,049 reporters, 2.55 editors per reporter.
The BBC is a quarter of the UK
| Outlet | UK rows |
|---|---|
| BBC | 3,074 |
| The Guardian | 466 |
| ITV | 446 |
| The Times | 422 |
| The Telegraph | 403 |
| Financial Times | 374 |
| Sky | 292 |
| Bloomberg | 258 |
| ITN | 240 |
| The Sun | 226 |
Source: JournalistLabs, November 2026.
The BBC has 3,074 of the 12,094 UK rows, 25.4%. That is more than the next seven outlets together (2,661). We did not expect Bloomberg in the top ten: it has 258 people in the UK, more than ITN or The Sun. The ten outlets above account for 6,201 rows, 51.3% of the UK total. The other 1,174 outlets share the rest, and 1,069 of them have fewer than ten rows.
London has 46%
| City | Rows | Share of 12,094 |
|---|---|---|
| London | 5,601 | 46.3% |
| Manchester | 325 | 2.7% |
| Bristol | 162 | 1.3% |
| Glasgow | 137 | 1.1% |
| Belfast | 130 | 1.1% |
| Leeds | 108 | 0.9% |
| Cardiff | 100 | 0.8% |
| Edinburgh | 98 | 0.8% |
| No city on file | 2,475 | 20.5% |
Source: JournalistLabs, November 2026.
London has 17 times as many rows as Manchester, the second city. London newsrooms have 3,077 editors and 1,389 reporters, 2.22 editors per reporter. Outside London, including rows with no city, the ratio is 1.44.
How we counted
A row counts as UK when the person's own location is in the United Kingdom,
whatever the outlet's home country. That is why Bloomberg appears. Base: the
127,602 editorial rows with platform_domain == 0 and media_typed == 1,
people data pulled from July to September 2026. Roles come from the job
title. City is the person's city as given; 2,475 rows have none. The
journalist statistics roundup collects
other published counts.
Dataset
uk_by_city.csv, uk_by_outlet.csv, uk_by_role.csv, README.md, METHOD.md
Cite this
JournalistLabs, How many journalists are in the UK?, 2026-11-09, https://journalistlabs.com/research/how-many-journalists-in-the-uk/.