13 of 127,602 newsroom journalists name Substack in their profile headline. 850 name a podcast

Thirteen of the 127,602 newsroom journalists in our base mention Substack in their profile headline, 0.01%. That is the line under the name on a professional profile, where people list a podcast, a book or a side project next to their job. 850 mention a podcast and 191 a newsletter.

Source: JournalistLabs, October 2026.

We expected Substack to show up more often, since a personal newsletter seemed like the kind of thing a journalist would put next to their outlet. In our rows they mostly do not.

What journalists put in their headline

A podcast is 65 times as common as Substack in these headlines. The BBC alone has 103 rows that mention a podcast.

Where the 13 work

Seven of the 13 are in the United States. The outlets are the BBC, The Guardian (Australia), The Independent, The Wall Street Journal, The Des Moines Register, JTA, Monocle, The New Republic, Postmedia, The Epoch Times, WUSF, Pearson and one local paper. Four of the job titles are columnist or contributing editor jobs.

One more row has no country and is left off the list.

What this count misses

It counts journalists who still work at a newsroom. People who left to write a Substack full time list substack.com as their employer, and our base leaves platform domains out, so they are not in these 127,602 rows. It also misses anyone who runs a Substack and does not name it in the headline. So 13 is a floor for staff journalists who advertise a Substack, not a count of journalists with one.

How we counted

The base is the 127,602 editorial rows we publish counts from, people data pulled from July to September 2026. 124,256 of them have a profile headline. We lowercased each headline and checked it for each term as plain text. We dropped "book" from the list because it also matches "Facebook". The headline text itself is not published; the list shows outlet, country and job title.