Journalism by numbers: trajectories of growth and decline of journalists in the Australian census 1961–2016

In this article, we use the five-yearly census of occupations to develop an historical perspective on Australian journalist employment from 1961. We do so for two reasons. First, we gauge the impact on journalist employment of online media from 1996 and media platforms since 2006 comparing these to previous media transformations. Second, we explore journalism and its occupational profile noting its close connection with authors and public relations professions. To allow for a period when the Australian Bureau of Statistics placed journalists and authors together as in a single occupational grouping (from 1961 to 1981), we track their combined employment from 1961 to 2016. From 1986, we consider journalists and authors separately. In each case, we consider numbers employed, their respective proportion of the workforce and their compound annual growth rates establishing the extent to which employment grew above – or fell below – that of the workforce as a whole. We show the gradual recalibration of journalists and their writer–author counterparts with respect to each other. From 1996, we outline the performance of different kinds of journalist over the 20 years to 2016 covering both online’s first open Internet decade and its second closed media platform from 2006 to 2016.