What Do Journalists Have in Common?

A Data Analysis of the American News Bubble

Two years ago, I wrote What Makes a Billionaire, breaking down the most common traits of American billionaires. Today, I’m going to do the same for American journalists. What attributes are shared by this semi-elite group of people?

To answer this question, I ranked the top 10,000 journalists on Twitter (article here) and did a data analysis on them. Here are the main things that top journalists have in common.

1) They Write for the New York Times

Of all the journalists I found on Twitter, most worked for the New York Times. The Times is not just the most prestigious news organization in America, it’s also the largest. It employs over 3000 reporters and publishes many more. Number 2 publisher the Guardian similarly posts articles from a wide variety of non-employee contributors. The 3rd and 4th spots go to Bloomberg and CNN which can use profits from related businesses (terminals and tv news) to hire many reporters. Finally, the wire services (Reuters, AP, AFP) also employ many journalists.

2) They Live in New York or Washington or LA

Twitter bios often include a location. With this info it became clear that almost all US journalists live in either New York or DC or LA. A few also live in the Bay Area (covering the tech beat), but even more live in Brooklyn. As expected, the business of news exists in something of a geographic bubble

3) They’re Overwhelmingly Liberal

Journalists on twitter can be studied like any other network. We can observe who they are “friends” with, by recording who they follow. In this way, we can measure which journalists are the most influential among their peers as well as the general public. If we rank the top journalists by number of Twitter followers, we see a nice split between…