Is The New York Times’ newsroom just a bunch of Ivy Leaguers? (Kinda, sorta.)

The New York Times is the most prominent news organization in the United States — and, by general consensus, the pinnacle of the journalism career ladder. Sure, star reporters sometimes leave the Times for a rival — but more often, it’s the Times that’s busy snapping up other outlets’ talent. Fifteen years ago, it employed about 1% of all American newspaper employees, a number that had held steady for decades; today, that number is approaching 7%. Its remarkable financial success has made it one of the very few news organizations where the next few years can be viewed with more optimism than dread.

So who works there? Who are the 1,700-or-so people¹ writing the stories, editing the headlines, shooting the photos, building the interactives — and taking up an ever-growing share of the news universe as local media shrivels?

The stereotype of a Times journalist — what in Gay Talese’s day was called a Timesman — is deeply intertwined with their education. The Timesman is a product of the Northeastern educational elite — from money, perhaps, but also with a fancy degree from an Ivy League school. (In The Kingdom and the Power, Talese described the Times’ 1960s hiring editor as someone “who preferred hiring as copyboys tweedy graduates of Ivy League colleges who swore by The Times, who would eagerly accept employment in the Times building even as window washers…there were copyboys employed at that very moment who had master’s degrees and Ph.Ds.”) But stereotypes are just stereotypes — what sort of educational background actually points the way to a Times job?

A few weeks ago, the Times did something that lets us have a peek inside. It redesigned the bio pages that you reach when clicking on a journalist’s byline. Most had previously featured only a bare-bones bio, if that. But now they would feature expanded background information, “designed to bolster trust with readers by letting them know who we are and how we work,” according to a memo from editors Marc Lacey and Matt Ericson:

Before I go any further: This seems like as good a place as any to note a few very obvious things. Nieman Lab, the website you’re reading, is part of — and thus I am an employee of — Harvard University, which is about as Ivy League as Ivy League gets. Even worse, many years ago, I graduated from Yale. (I was a first-generation college student from a small Louisiana town, if that helps!) Several other Nieman Lab staffers also have Ivy degrees. It’s a little weird to hear even a gentle “maybe hire some more non-Ivy Leaguers?” from a doubled-down Ivy Leaguer. Given all that, you are free to view this piece as hypocrisy, as irony, as class warfare, or as a cosmically funny joke — the pot calling the kettle elite. It’s up to you!

But here’s the reality: The contemporary American news industry is unrepresentative in a long list of ways. Diversifying news outlets can be hard work — but it’s especially hard in periods of decline, when more people are exiting the newsroom than entering. (That’s true even when contracts don’t mandate seniority preferences in layoffs.) So those rare publishers who are still growing have an extra responsibility to do the work. (Especially when their business models are increasingly based on reaching the richer and more highly educated segments of the public.)

You may remember a kerfuffle over this back in 2019, when Theodore Kim, then the Times’ director of newsroom fellowships and internships, tweeted out what he described as a “super unscientific opinion on which U.S. schools churn out the most consistently productive candidates”:

Of the Times staffers with a Columbia master’s, 10 got their undergraduate degree outside the U.S. — meaning Columbia likely served as a sort of bridge into a career in the U.S. Of the 50 Columbia master’s alums with an American undergrad degree¹², only 8 had attended a public university for undergrad. The rest had attended private universities, most of them without journalism degree programs. (Twenty-one had gone to Ivy Plus schools.) This would seem to support the conventional wisdom that Columbia is a common path for people who decide to get into journalism after getting their bachelor’s. (As I have written before, I believe there’s real potential in creating some alternative path for these people that doesn’t involve spending $100,000 and moving to New York City for a year.)

Beyond Columbia, second-place NYU illustrates the pull of New York City. You’ll also note sizable representation from U.K. universities — a roughly even mix of native Brits and Americans crossing the pond for grad school. (Note that several of these British universities — LSE, City, King’s, UCL, SOAS, and Birkbeck — are all constituent colleges of the federated University of London. If counted together, they’d represent 12 Timesian master’s programs — in third place, behind NYU.)

Photo of the ivy-covered wall of Princeton’s Nassau Hall by Tim Alex

1. With 42 newsroom jobs posted at this writing!
2. For those interested, the top non-U.S. undergrad alma maters are overwhelmingly in the U.K. and Canada: McGill 5, Oxford 4, Cambridge 4, City University London 3, Leeds 3, Toronto Metropolitan 3, London School of Economics 2, Queen’s 2, Sciences Po 2, Calgary 2, Edinburgh 2, Sydney 2, Toronto 2, University of the Arts London 2, and 24 others each with 1.
3. I am including here and throughout five Times staffers who listed Barnard College, the women’s college that is part of Columbia University.
4. Included here are two who listed the University of Texas Pan American, which was merged into UT Rio Grande Valley in 2018.
5. One City College and one Brooklyn College, for the record.
6. I should note that, while the 460 expanded bios represent many different corners of the newsroom, they are disproportionately reporters rather than editors. (That makes sense, given that editors don’t usually have bylines to click on.) So I separately looked up the undergrad alma maters of the 12 people currently on the Times’ news masthead. Five were undergrad Ivy Leaguers (two Harvard, one each Yale, Columbia, and Cornell), five attended other private colleges (Williams, Notre Dame, Bates, Northeastern, and the University of St. Thomas), and two attended state flagships (Minnesota and Iowa).
7. See page 52. Note that this study by Dominique Baker et al. uses slightly different definitions — for example, its “Ivy Plus” adds only Stanford, Duke, MIT, Northwestern, and Chicago.
8. Full disclosure: I teach at BU.
9. Update: I originally had this total as five, mistakenly omitting Fort Valley State.
10. Noting again for the people in the back: This is a website based at Harvard! We may have a certain amount of affection for the institution that pays our bills.
11. For the number-sticklers: This includes the 449 for whom I was able to determine an undergraduate program for — the group in the data above, after adding back in the non-U.S. schools — plus two who listed only a graduate degree and for whom I couldn’t find undergrad info.
12. The eagle-eyed among you will note 50+10≠61. I’m excluding one person with a Columbia master’s whose undergrad I couldn’t determine.