Should you bring in more reporters? Maybe

Dorian heads Teeming Media, a thought leadership communication consultancy focused on media technology, as well as The Verticals Collective group of media company founders and operators. He teaches media business at Columbia University’s J-school and the Zicklin School of Business at CUNY/Baruch.

Congratulations! After lots of hard work, you are finally at a point where you’re earning enough to think about hiring more people. But who to hire? And to do what?

Small news organizations — often run by journalists and editors — can be keen to hire more reporters. And that may be a great choice. But if you want to stay financially solvent, you’ll want to consider other positions, too.

Looking at ratios

While reporters make the stuff that makes money, they are, I’m sorry to say, considered an expense. So are photographers and videographers, editors, producers, and administrative, operations, and tech people. That’s why employees who bring in revenue — people in sales, subscriptions, and the like— have to bring in multiples more than they earn. A typical ratio for ad salespeople, for example, is to bring in 3-5 times their compensation.

Another ratio to keep in mind is how many people it takes to support your reporters, photographers, etc. For every few journalists, you’ll need to bring on another editor. Or, if an increase in great journalism means you sell more subscriptions, you may need more customer service help. More events means more event marketing and support. And so on.

One common benchmark is to have about three non-editorial people for each editorial one. That’s a general guide which, as we’ll see below, can vary widely by organization.

Another benchmark to monitor is revenue-per-employee. (You can count freelancers at a fractional rate of full-time employees). Hiring more people without a proportional increase in revenue eventually threatens your long-term financial viability.

Know your business

If you have enough funds to hire just one more person, by all means make it an editorial person doing great stuff to better serve your community. That extra journalism should bring more views (or listens), more of what fulfills your mission, and, yes, more income.

Then, for your next hire, consider what’s working, financially. Are you primarily ad- or subscription-supported? Or perhaps events are your main revenue driver. You can hire next for that — to support ad sales, or subscriptions, or events. If you’re funded by voluntary contributions, it may be wise to hire a skilled fundraiser or grant writer. (Mother Jones, as an example, apportioned 12.5% of their expenses to fundraising in a recent fiscal year.) 

You can also hire so as to free up your editorial people to do more of their high-value work. A founder of 404 Media told Peter Kafka’s Channels podcast how their team of four journalist-founders hired a part-time social media producer.

“When we launched, it was the four of us doing everything,” said co-founder Jason Koebler. “Now, it’s like, what are we spending a lot of time on, and where can we sort of make our lives a little bit easier by bringing people on.”

Or maybe focus on your business, not ratios

A community of publishers I asked about their ratios of editorial to non-editorial staff came back with wide-ranging answers specific to their operations. One even dismissed the question.

Technical.ly co-founder and CEO Christopher Wink said they’ve become “editorially heavy,” at about a 50-50 ratio in a 20-person team that balances editorial vs. product, client services, and operations. “During the pandemic I dropped the four-person events team,” he said.

Scott Clavena, co-founder and CEO of a climate-tech startup called Latitude Media, said they’re weighted in the other direction, with three editorial people and 13 doing other things such as research and events.

And Sean Griffey, who recently finished his tenure as CEO of Industry Dive, a multi-brand mix of industry publications, rejected the idea of ratios altogether.

“It is dangerous to think about editorial (or any role) as a ratio to the entire company.  And it is nearly impossible to use other organizations as a model,” he wrote in an email. Dive’s publications “all simultaneously balance three things: a monetization strategy, an audience strategy, and a content strategy,” he continued, adding that they hire for whatever of those things could best benefit at the time.

Perhaps you need to hire an “audience” person to attract more readers to the content you have. Or, maybe you want to increase ad revenue and so will hire an ad salesperson who can attract advertisers who’ll pay more than you’re getting from automated ads.

Sometimes, it pays to hire to elevate yourself, as 404’s founders did. The community of publishers I mentioned was recently discussing whether and when to hire a chief of staff, someone to handle or oversee operational tasks so executives can focus on more strategic work.

I’ll finish by also stipulating that the decision to hire is almost never purely financial. As a leader, you’re always focussed on your mission while also working to keep the lights on. Sometimes, you’ll make the call to hire someone even if it doesn’t make sense financially in the short-term. You might have the opportunity to hire a standout journalist who was just let go from another publication, or a talented coder who loves what you do and wants to help. 

Ultimately, if you make smart, mission-driven and sound choices, your decisions should pay off.

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Cite this article

Benkoil, Dorian (2025, 27). Who to hire and how to decide. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/who-to-hire-and-how-to-decide/