Men dominate sports and government reporting; health and education reporters more likely to be women, Pew finds

LINK: www.pewresearch.org ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | April 4, 2023

Struggle, chaos, no regrets? Journalists love the work they do, despite industry challenges

June 14, 2022

Men and sports! Women and families! U.S. journalists’ beats vary based on their gender and race — and still largely break down along stereotypical lines, according to some research that Pew Research released Tuesday. The new data points were pulled from a report on nearly 12,000 U.S. journalists that Pew published in 2022. Here are a few interesting data points:

— Male journalists were still much more likely to cover sports. Women were more likely to cover health, and family and education.

— Travel and entertainment are “the only topic area in which a majority of those who cover it (57%) are freelance or self-employed journalists.” Perhaps not coincidentally, travel is also where BuzzFeed is experimenting with AI-generated content.

— Pew found that journalists’ beats vary “modestly” by race and ethnicity. White journalists — who accounted for about three-quarters of the journalists Pew surveyed in total — represented large majorities of every beat except for “social issues and policy.”

More here.

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