This report is based mainly on an online survey carried out between 27 September and 30 November 2023. The survey was carried out as part of the Worlds of Journalism Study. Three of the editors of this report (Neil Thurman, Imke Henkel, and Sina Thäsler-Kordonouri – hereafter ‘the team’) oversaw the sampling and the data collection, processing, and cleaning. The other editor, chapter authors, and the Reuters Institute were not involved in the sampling, survey design, data collection, data processing, or data cleaning, but carried out secondary analysis of the final anonymised UK Worlds of Journalism Study dataset.

After data cleaning, the survey’s sample had 1,130 responses, a sample that is broadly representative of the total population of UK journalists. Of this total, 1,024 journalists answered every question and a further 106 only answered the questions that were mandatory. In this section, we lay out the methodology in detail, describing the ongoing, collaborative, international, and comparative survey project – the Worlds of Journalism Study – that is the source of this report’s questionnaire and overall approach, and assessing the representativeness of the sample.

11.1 The questionnaire

The questionnaire used in this study was developed as part of the third wave of an international project, the Worlds of Journalism Study, involving researchers and academics worldwide. Between 2021 and 2024 (inclusive), using the same core questions, researchers surveyed journalists in over 70 countries, gathering

data on journalists’ personal characteristics and diversity, employment conditions, and working routines as well as their opinions on ethics and standards; the influences on their work and perceptions of press freedom and editorial autonomy; their role in society; truth, interpretation and objectivity; and their safety and well-being.

The survey we discuss here localised some questions in the Worlds of Journalism Study’s questionnaire to the UK context, for example the questions on religious affiliation, salary, and ethnicity. Furthermore, it added two questions related to journalists’ socio-economic backgrounds. The full UK questionnaire is available on Figshare (Thurman et al. 2024a).

The complete set of data from all the countries involved in the Worlds of Journalism Study was not available in time to be used in this publication, which focuses on the UK data. However, further publications are planned, which will include comparisons between journalists in the UK and their colleagues in around 72 countries.¹

11.2 Sampling strategy

In order to build the sample, the team first obtained a list of journalists’ names, email addresses, and professional affiliations from the Roxhill Media database. In the Roxhill database, journalists are associated with particular ‘outlet types’, such as ‘National (newspapers)’. Contact details were downloaded for UK-based journalists working across all of Roxhill’s outlet types, specifically: blogs, business ‘trade’ magazines, consumer magazines, national and regional newspapers, news and picture agencies and newswires, podcasts, national and regional radio stations, national and regional TV stations, and ‘Freelance’ (also a Roxhill outlet type).

To include UK foreign correspondents – journalists working for UK publications from overseas – the team also downloaded from Roxhill the contact details of journalists based outside the UK.² To eliminate journalists from this list who did not work for UK-based publications, a list of all UK media outlets was downloaded from Roxhill (n=12,831). Only journalists who worked for at least one of these UK media outlets were retained.

With each of the lists of UK-based journalists and UK foreign correspondents, the team removed contact details that had no contact email address and attempted to remove all contacts that were to generic news desks (e.g. ‘News desk’, ‘Foreign Desk’, ‘Sports Desk’). Because some journalists were associated with more than one outlet type (e.g. national radio and national television), a deduplication process was also undertaken. This resulted in a list of 35,775 UK-based journalists and a list of 4,463 UK foreign correspondents. These two lists were combined. After some duplicates and further contacts with generic email addresses were removed, a final list of 40,040 was left.

There is no official record of the population of journalists in the UK (or journalists working for UK-based publications outside the UK). However, at the time of writing in February 2025, data were available from the 2021 Census for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland on the numbers of people living in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland who declared they were employed as editors, journalists, and reporters, using these two 2020 Standard Occupational Classifications:

• SOC 2491: Newspaper, Periodical and Broadcast Editors
• SOC 2492: Newspaper, Periodical and Broadcast Journalists and Reporters

The 2021 Census estimates 30,060 people worked as ‘newspaper, periodical and broadcast editors’ in England and Wales in March to May 2021 (ONS 2023). Another 24,630 people were estimated to be working as ‘newspaper, periodical and broadcast journalists and reporters’, a total of 54,690. The 2021 Census also estimated that there were 674 ‘newspaper and periodical journalists and reporters’ and 324 ‘newspaper, periodical and broadcast editors’ in Northern Ireland (NISRA 2023). That makes a total for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland of 55,688.

Because equivalent data from the 2022 Scottish Census were not available at the time of writing, the team had to estimate the number of journalists in Scotland. The UK’s Office for National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey (ONS 2021) showed that, in February, March, and April 2021 (around the time the 2021 Census was taken) the number of people aged 16 and over in employment for the countries in the UK was as follows:

• England and Wales: 28,712,314
• Northern Ireland: 823,215
• Scotland: 2,638,571

Therefore, approximately 0.19% of the employed population of England and Wales were journalists and approximately 0.12% of the employed population of Northern Ireland. Taking the higher proportion for Scotland (0.19%) gives an estimate that 5,026 journalists were working in Scotland. That brings the estimated total number of journalists in the UK to 60,714 (but excluding foreign correspondents working for UK publications). This means that the list of journalists (based in the UK) generated by the Roxhill database represents around 59% of the total population of journalists in the UK.

If the list of 4,463 foreign correspondents working for UK publications generated by the Roxhill database also represents around 59% of the total population of journalists, then the total population of foreign correspondents would be 7,565. Adding that to the estimated total number of journalists in the UK (60,714) equals 68,279.

Because the team wanted the sample size to have a confidence level of at least 95% and a maximum error margin of 3%, with an estimated population of 68,279, they aimed for a sample size of at least 1,051. Based on experience of the previous UK leg of the Worlds of Journalism Study survey in 2015 (Thurman et al. 2016), they expected the response rate to the online survey to be relatively low for this hard-to-reach group. As a result, they decided to send email invitations to a random selection of 16,497 journalists from the list of 40,040.

Including reminders, journalists received up to 11 email invitations to participate in the survey between 27 September and 29 November 2023. Participation was by invitation only. The survey was closed on 30 November 2023. The survey was hosted on the Qualtrics online survey platform. In an attempt to increase the response rate, the later email invitations stated that a donation of £1,050 would be made to a journalism charity once the 1,050th survey was completed. As this target was met, the team made this donation to Reporters Without Borders. The project was submitted for ethical review at Birkbeck, University of London, and received approval on 2 June 2023.

11.3 Exclusions

The team conducted extensive research – including via LinkedIn, X/Twitter, the Roxhill Media database, and news outlets featuring the journalists’ work – to be sure each respondent met the definition of a journalist. Respondents were excluded if:

• they did not work for a news outlet with an identifiable focus on providing news,
• they did not work for a news outlet that had a UK base and was aimed, at least in part, at a UK audience, and
• they did not earn at least 50% of their income from journalism or work for at least 18.2 hours per week as a journalist (which is 50% of a regular working week in the UK).

Furthermore, respondents were excluded if they did not complete the survey up to and including the question asking them about how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: ‘I am concerned that those who harm journalists in the United Kingdom go unpunished’, a question that appeared approximately 42% into the survey.

After these exclusions were made, the final sample was 1,130. If we take the total population of UK journalists to be 68,279 (see above), the survey’s sample size can be considered to be robust by the standards of social survey research, with a margin of error of between 2.89% and 3.04% at a confidence level of 95%.³ As such, throughout the report, we do not consider differences of +/– 3pp or lower to be meaningful. Combined percentages for different response options do not always add up to 100% due to rounding. Where we refer to percentages for grouped responses in the text we sum the proportions of rounded individual responses in order to match the figures.

11.4 Additional variables

As required by the Worlds of Journalism Study, of which this survey is part, values for four variables were manually assigned to each respondent by the team: the journalists’ rank [no operational or strategic authority, operational authority, strategic authority] and the reach [local, regional, national, transnational], ownership [private/commercial media, public service media, state-run media, community media, non-profit media], and location [London, other city, rural] of the main outlet (if any) they worked for. The rank coding was done with reference to the answers each journalist had given to relevant questions in the survey, such as job title/position, as well as, if necessary, additional online research. The coding of the characteristics of the main outlet (if any) they worked for was done via extensive online research.

11.5 Data cleaning and anonymisation

Each response to each question was examined and some changes were made. For example, a respondent who classified their ethnicity as ‘Any other ethnic group, please write in:’ was reclassified to one of the items in the predefined list (‘Any other White background’) because they had written their ethnicity was ‘white European’. After data cleaning, an anonymised version of the data was shared with the Reuters Institute and the other authors of this report.

11.6 Response rate and representativeness

Although the team sent email invitations to a random selection of 16,497 journalists from the list of 40,040, not all invitations were received. Invitation emails were sometimes rejected as spam, or journalists never received them because they were away on holiday. It was common for between a quarter and a third of the emails sent in each distribution to ‘fail’ or ‘bounce’. If we assume that all journalists whose email inboxes rejected at least one invitation did successfully receive an invitation on another occasion, the response rate (calculated with reference to the journalists kept in the final sample) would be 6.9%. However, this assumption is implausible because spam policies are unlikely to reject one email and allow another, some journalists (e.g. those on parental leave) were out of the office for the whole of the two months of the survey fieldwork, and some email addresses were out of date because journalists had moved employers. Therefore, we believe the actual response rate to be higher than 6.9%, although we cannot say by how much.

Although there is ‘no central, all-inclusive list of journalists’ in the UK (NCTJ 2012, 12), the team used data – from the 2021 Census of England and Wales – on the population of journalists in England and Wales to help judge the representativeness of the sample of UK-based journalists. However, in interpreting the comparisons made, it is important to bear the following differences in mind: the sample includes journalists living in Scotland and Northern Ireland; the sample excluded journalists who did not earn at least 50% of their income from journalism or work for at least 18.2 hours per week as a journalist; it also excluded journalists who worked for outlets that were deemed not to have an identifiable focus on providing news or did not have a UK base and were aimed, at least in part, at a UK audience. The 2021 Census classified individuals as journalists solely on the basis of their self-identification as such.

Keeping these limitations in mind, as well as the differences in the timing of the respective fieldwork, as shown in Table 11.1, the sample (49% male) is very similar to the journalists recorded in the 2021 England and Wales Census data (who were 48% male) in terms of gender/biological sex at birth. The 2023 sample is, however, a little older (63% are over 39 compared with 53% in the England and Wales Census). This difference could, in part, be due to the minimum requirements set regarding journalists’ income and working hours, which may have excluded some younger, part-time journalists included in the 2021 Census data.

Although UK-based respondents in the sample skew a little older than those who identified as journalists in the 2021 Census of England and Wales, we believe that this difference is not an indication of any fundamental flaw in the sampling strategy or of response bias, but rather, as discussed above, the result of differences in the respective inclusion criteria used.

Figure 11.1