The New York Times has 16 audience job titles on file, ESPN 15

16 of the 2,168 New York Times people in our base have "audience" in their job title, more than at any other outlet. ESPN is second with 15, out of 957 rows.

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

The ranking

346 of the 127,602 editorial rows we publish counts from carry an audience or search title, 0.27%. They sit at 151 outlets.

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

Ties are ordered by the outlet's row count. Of the 202 outlets with 100 or more rows, 60 have at least one audience title. The Atlantic has the highest share among them, 7 of 145 rows, then The Independent with 11 of 243.

What the titles say

The two newsrooms name the job differently. All 16 New York Times titles are different strings, and none uses the word "engagement". Most attach the job to a desk: "Audience Editor, Metro", "Audience Editor, Culture & Lifestyle", "Senior Audience Editor, International", "Staff Editor, Opinion Audience", "Supervising Audience Editor, Video". The most senior is a senior director of audience and editorial strategy.

At ESPN, 13 of the 15 titles say "audience engagement", in 11 different spellings of the same job: "General Editor, Audience Engagement", "Associate Editor - Audience Engagement", "Senior Editor, Audience Engagement" and so on. The other two say "audience expansion".

USA Today is the only outlet in the top 15 with a search title. Two of its 12 rows say "Search & Optimization Editor" or "Editor, Search & Optimization".

Across the base, "Audience Editor" is the commonest string at 68 rows, followed by "Audience Engagement Editor" at 35. 91 of the 346 rows say "engagement". 313 are classed as editors and 23 as reporters. The US holds 244 of the rows and the UK 60.

What the count misses

We started from the idea that both newsrooms have about 15 audience or SEO job titles. The audience half held. The SEO half did not show up: titles with the word "SEO" are classed as non-editorial when our base is built, so they are not in it. Only 5 rows reach the count through "search engine optimization" or "search & optimization" spelled out. A newsroom that calls its search staff "SEO Editor" shows no search titles here.

We hold 2,168 New York Times people and 957 ESPN people, not either full staff. The counts are of the people on our rows. A person who does audience work under a plain title such as "Editor" is not counted, so 346 is a count of job titles, not of everyone who does the work.

How we counted

The base is the 127,602 editorial rows we publish counts from, people data pulled from July to September 2026. We matched "audience", "search engine optimization" (or "optimisation") and "search & optimization" as plain text over the job-title field, case-insensitive. The profile headline is not used. Outlet names follow the site's outlet pages. The dataset has the counts per outlet, role, country and title string; no person-level rows.