The NYT lists 1.8 editors per reporter. The BBC lists 1.9 reporters per editor.

Key findings

1. The New York Times carries 1,144 editors and 632 reporters among its 2,168 editorial rows, 1.81 editors per reporter.
2. The BBC carries 1,957 reporters and 1,038 editors among its 3,935 editorial rows, 1.89 reporters per editor.
3. Across the 40 largest newsrooms on file the ratio runs from The Indian Express at 2.83 editors per reporter, on 446 editorial rows, down to Sveriges Radio at 0.02, on 764.
4. Narrowing "editor" to text editors only moves the NYT from 1.81 to 1.57 editors per reporter, on 995 narrow editors of its 1,144, and moves the BBC from 1.89 to 2.17 reporters per editor, on 901 narrow editors of its 1,038.
5. The whole published base of 127,602 rows holds 54,548 editors and 46,013 reporters, 1.19 editors per reporter; the narrow count of 45,317 editors takes that to 0.98.
6. By outlet type, magazines run at 4.54 editors per reporter on 4,222 editorial rows and wire agencies at 0.65 on 5,448, with newspapers at 1.22 on 44,234 and broadcasters at 0.89 on 52,664.
7. By the person's own country, Argentina runs at 8.00 editors per reporter on 279 rows and Brazil at 5.60 on 1,024, against Sweden at 0.12 on 1,879 and Denmark at 0.13 on 1,125.
8. The five largest wire agencies on file (of 59) put 22.8% of their 3,324 editorial rows under correspondent titles; the eight largest newspapers among the 40 (of 10; USA Today and New York Post omitted) put 8.5% of their 6,893 rows there, and all ten put 8.0% of their 7,679 rows there.
9. The commonest exact title at the NYT is "Reporter", 197 of 2,168 rows (9.1%); at the BBC it is "Journalist", 419 of 3,935 rows (10.6%).
10. 394 of the 1,144 NYT editors (34.4%) have chief, executive, deputy or senior in the title text, against 207 of the 1,038 BBC editors (19.9%).
11. The NYT has 2,168 editorial rows on file against the 1,700 journalists published in 2023 (128%); the BBC has 3,935 against 5,500 (72%).
12. The base is 127,602 of 173,133 classified editorial rows, and 100,561 of those 127,602 (78.8%) carry the role reporter or editor at all.

The NYT lists 1.81 editors per reporter and the BBC 1.89 reporters per editor

The New York Times has 1,144 editors and 632 reporters among the 2,168 editorial rows we hold for it, which is 1.81 editors per reporter. The same two columns give the BBC 1,957 reporters and 1,038 editors among 3,935 editorial rows, which is 1.89 reporters per editor. We print each outlet in whichever direction gives a number above one.

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

We went in expecting the NYT and the BBC to sit near each other, because both are large national newsrooms with heavy desk structures. They sit eight positions from the top and eight from the bottom of 40 instead. We did not expect a gap that wide. The direction made sense once we read what people type into the title field, which is the section on job titles below.

The 40 largest newsrooms run from 2.83 editors per reporter to 0.02

These are the 40 publishable outlets with the most editorial rows, the same 40 that have /outlets/<slug>/ pages on the site. Each outlet's own editorial rows are the denominator of its role columns. Rank is the exact, unrounded ratio, descending, with ties broken by editorial rows, descending, so two rows can print the same two-decimal ratio and sit one apart.

At the top: The Indian Express at 2.83 editors per reporter, on 255 editors and 90 reporters; ESPN at 2.65, on 600 editors and 226 reporters; the Financial Times at 2.45, on 313 editors and 128 reporters. At the bottom: Sveriges Radio at 0.02, on 17 editors and 711 reporters; DR - Danmarks Radio at 0.10, on 58 editors and 578 reporters; SVT at 0.15, on 63 editors and 409 reporters.

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

Counting only text editors takes the NYT to 1.57 and the BBC to 2.17

Our editor role includes video, photo, copy and audio editors, who do not handle copy from reporters. The narrow count drops them.

At the NYT, 1,144 editors become 995 narrow editors against the same 632 reporters, so 1.81 falls to 1.57, and the outlet moves from rank 8 to rank 5. At the BBC, 1,038 editors become 901 against 1,957 reporters, and the readable direction goes from 1.89 to 2.17 reporters per editor. The BBC moves from rank 33 to rank 34 of 40 on the narrow count, one place below Deutsche Welle, which is at 0.4644 narrow editors per reporter against the BBC's 0.4604. The published base moves from 1.19 to 0.98 editors per reporter, on 45,317 narrow editors against 46,013 reporters, so the base crosses one editor per reporter when the narrow count is used.

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

The outlet the narrowing rearranges is The Indian Express. Its 255 editors become 111, the ratio falls from 2.83 to 1.23, and it drops from rank 1 to rank 12. Most of its editor rows are sub-editor and copy titles, which we file under the copy editor kind. We did not expect the top of the ranking to be that fragile, and it is the reason both columns are in the dataset rather than only the wide one.

The ends of the ranking barely move. The top five under the narrow definition are the Financial Times 2.25, ESPN 2.24, The Telegraph 1.64, ETV Bharat 1.61 and The New York Times 1.57. The bottom five are ABC News (Australia) 0.31, Anadolu Agency 0.21, SVT 0.13, DR - Danmarks Radio 0.09 and Sveriges Radio 0.02, in the same rank positions 36 to 40 they hold under the wide definition.

The BBC's 3,935 rows sit on three company domains, and bbc.co.uk carries 3,192 of them

Every row carries the company domain the vendor recorded for the employer. The BBC key covers three of those domains and the New York Times key covers two.

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

nytco.com carries 1,801 of the Times's 2,168 rows, with 566 reporters and 963 editors, 1.70 editors per reporter. nytimes.com carries the other 367, with 66 reporters and 181 editors, 2.74 editors per reporter. nytco.com is the website the vendor records for the New York Times Company page, so the two NYT domains are two company records for one employer.

bbc.co.uk carries 3,192 of the BBC's 3,935 rows, with 1,734 reporters and 635 editors, 0.37 editors per reporter, which reads as 2.73 reporters per editor. bbc.com carries 463 rows, with 161 reporters and 248 editors, 1.54 editors per reporter. bbcstudios.com carries 280 rows, with 62 reporters and 155 editors, 2.50 editors per reporter. bbcstudios.com is BBC Studios, the BBC's commercial production and distribution arm. Excluding it leaves 3,655 rows, 1,895 reporters and 883 editors, 2.15 reporters per editor, against 1.89 for the outlet as a whole.

We merged these domains in our alias table before this report and left the merge as it is, so the headline is on the merged outlet.

Magazines run at 4.54 editors per reporter and wire agencies at 0.65

By outlet type, over every publishable outlet in each bucket and not only the 40:

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

Magazines are at 4.54 editors per reporter on 4,222 editorial rows across 183 outlets, the highest of the five buckets. Wire agencies are at 0.65 on 5,448 rows across 59 outlets, the lowest. Broadcasters are at 0.89 on 52,664 rows and newspapers at 1.22 on 44,234. The type rows sum to 123,453 rows, which is 4,149 short of the 127,602 base: 3,313 rows sit at 8 of the 12 parent-company domains we exclude from every outlet table, 459 sit at outlets whose own record carries no type, and 377 sit at typed outlets with no publishable name or country.

Argentina runs at 8.00 editors per reporter and Sweden at 0.12

Counted by the person's own country, over the 43 countries with 200 rows or more. Argentina is at 8.00 editors per reporter on 279 rows, Brazil at 5.60 on 1,024 and Mexico at 3.56 on 406. Sweden is at 0.12 on 1,879 rows, Norway at 0.12 on 550, Denmark at 0.13 on 1,125 and Finland at 0.33 on 408. The United States is at 1.31 on 69,377 rows, the United Kingdom at 1.75 on 12,094, India at 1.57 on 7,656, Canada at 1.76 on 3,026 and Australia at 0.91 on 4,170.

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland are the four lowest of the 43 countries. The full country list is in the dataset.

Wire agencies put 22.8% of rows under correspondent titles, newspapers 8.5%

Our classifier tests correspondent before reporter, so a correspondent title never lands on the reporter side of the ratio. If one kind of newsroom titles its field staff correspondent and another titles them reporter, the ratio changes without anything about the newsroom changing.

The five largest wire agencies on file (of 59) put 757 of their 3,324 editorial rows under correspondent titles, 22.8%. The eight largest newspapers among the 40 (of 10; USA Today and New York Post omitted) put 586 of their 6,893 rows there, 8.5%. All ten typed newspapers among the 40 put 612 of their 7,679 rows there, 8.0%.

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

Reuters is at 40.0% of its 710 rows and Anadolu Agency at 41.5% of its 383, while the AP is at 14.7% of 1,057 and AFP at 15.1% of 865, closer to the newspapers than to the other wires. The range inside the five wires runs from 9.1% at PA Media to 41.5% at Anadolu Agency, which is wider than the 22.8% against 8.5% between the wire group and the eight largest newspapers. We can count which word each newsroom uses, but we cannot tell from title text whether a Sveriges Radio reporter and a New York Times reporter do the same job.

The commonest NYT title is "Reporter" at 9.1% and the commonest BBC title is "Journalist" at 10.6%

The ten commonest exact title strings at each outlet, as the title field reads. The denominator is the outlet's editorial rows, 2,168 at the NYT and 3,935 at the BBC.

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

New York Times: Reporter 197 (9.1%), Journalist 75 (3.5%), Photo Editor 67 (3.1%), Staff Editor 62 (2.9%), Senior Staff Editor 47 (2.2%), Editor 45 (2.1%), Senior Editor 43 (2.0%), Staff Writer 34 (1.6%), Correspondent 28 (1.3%), Assistant Editor 25 (1.2%).

BBC: Journalist 419 (10.6%), Broadcast Journalist 349 (8.9%), Senior Journalist 150 (3.8%), Senior Broadcast Journalist 138 (3.5%), Radio Presenter 101 (2.6%), Presenter 93 (2.4%), Reporter 74 (1.9%), Editor 73 (1.9%), Assistant Editor 57 (1.4%), Television Presenter 50 (1.3%).

Four of the NYT's ten commonest titles name an editor and one names a reporter. One of the BBC's ten names an editor, and its four commonest are all some form of "journalist", which our classifier reads as reporter. That is most of where the two ratios come from. Anchors and presenters are 17.0% of the BBC's rows against 0.1% of the NYT's rows, where the count prints as "<5", so a large part of the BBC's newsroom sits outside the ratio altogether.

34.4% of NYT editors carry a senior word in the title, against 19.9% at the BBC

Testing the title text of editor rows for chief, executive, exec, deputy or senior: 394 of the 1,144 NYT editors match, 34.4%, and 207 of the 1,038 BBC editors match, 19.9%. This is a test on the title string, not our seniority column, and it is printed for editor rows only.

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

Our NYT count is 128% of the published figure and our BBC count is 72%

The New York Times is reported at 1,700 journalists as of March 2023, attributed to deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick alongside 5,800 company employees, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times. We hold 2,168 editorial rows for it, 128% of 1,700. The BBC News infobox gives 7,000 employees including 5,500 journalists, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_News. We hold 3,935 editorial rows for the BBC, 72% of 5,500. Both pages were fetched on 2026-09-15.

The 5,500 is BBC News's figure, while our 3,935 rows span bbc.co.uk, bbc.com and bbcstudios.com. bbc.co.uk on its own carries 3,192 rows, 58% of 5,500.

Our rows were not pulled on one date. The profiles behind the 127,602-row base carry fetch stamps between 2026-07-22 and 2026-09-15, 35.4% of them in July 2026 and 64.6% in August, so the on-file counts are read against a March 2023 figure for the NYT and an undated infobox figure for the BBC.

Source: JournalistLabs, September 2026.

We do not know why one outlet sits above its published headcount and the other below. Profile coverage, former staff who still list the outlet, and the three years between the 2023 figure and our collection window would each push a count up or down, and the dataset does not separate them. We could not find a headcount published by The New York Times Company itself: https://www.nytco.com/journalism/ and https://www.nytco.com/careers/newsroom/ return 200 with no number, https://www.nytco.com/company/newsroom/ is a 404, and the 2024 annual report PDF returned HTTP 500 through our gateway. We did not find a BBC annual-report journalist headcount either.

The funnel: 173,133 rows in, 127,602 published, 100,561 in the ratio

We read 173,133 classified editorial rows. 12,540 were dropped because the outlet domain is a link-in-bio, social or marketplace host rather than a newsroom. 32,991 were dropped because the outlet is not media-typed, which takes out universities, academic publishers and government agencies that reach our outlet table as employers of journalists. That leaves the published base of 127,602 rows. 31,911 of those 127,602 (25.0%) sit at the 40 outlets with pages. 100,561 of the 127,602 (78.8%) carry the role reporter or editor and go into the ratio; the other 27,041 (21.2%) are correspondents, anchors or presenters, producers, columnists, critics and other editorial. At the 40 outlets, 25,318 of the 31,911 rows (79.3%) are reporter or editor.

Role counts across the base of 127,602: editor 54,548 (42.7%), reporter 46,013 (36.1%), anchor or presenter 8,678 (6.8%), other editorial 6,625 (5.2%), correspondent 5,463 (4.3%), producer 2,856 (2.2%), columnist 2,522 (2.0%), critic 897 (0.7%).

The full method, including how the outlet universe and the role rules are built, is at https://journalistlabs.com/method/.

Every one of the 127,602 rows is a self-written job title

Job titles here are self-written profile text. People write aspirational titles. Some keep an old employer on the profile, and some use words their newsroom does not use internally. Every ratio on this page counts how staff describe themselves in that text.

Country is the person's own country, not the outlet's. A BBC row can carry a US country code, and the country cut above counts that row under the United States.

The BBC figure counts bbc.co.uk, bbc.com and bbcstudios.com together, and the New York Times figure counts nytimes.com and nytco.com together. Both merges are in our alias table. Parent-company domains are not merged into their titles, which is why 8 of the 12 parent-company domains carry rows, 3,313 in total, that are excluded from every outlet table rather than folded into one of them.

Cells of one to four rows print "<5". We do not publish the person-level base. The CSVs are the grain at which this report can be checked, so a reader outside the company can recompute every ratio and share on this page from them, down to the outlet, the type, the country and the company domain, but not down to the individual row.

Cite this

JournalistLabs, "The NYT lists 1.8 editors per reporter. The BBC lists 1.9 reporters per editor", September 2026, https://journalistlabs.com/research/nyt-two-editors-per-reporter-bbc-two-reporters-per-editor/.

Dataset

Every number on this page is in /static/data/nyt-two-editors-per-reporter-bbc-two-reporters-per-editor/: outlets_top40_editors_per_reporter.csv, editors_per_reporter_by_type_and_country.csv, nyt_bbc_role_mix.csv, wire_vs_newspaper_correspondents.csv and facts_console.txt, with a README.md listing the columns and denominators and a METHOD.md covering the base and the two definitions of editor. classifier_rules.txt holds the classifier's stoplist, its include list, the editor kinds and the beat lexicon, and nyt_bbc_by_domain.csv holds the NYT and BBC rows split by company domain. Data: CC BY 4.0, JournalistLabs, September 2026.