PUBLISHER

A trade title stored where a company name usually goes

LobbyVault’s industry table ranks grouped employer text from FEC individual receipts. Many contributors type a company. Others type the work they do. PUBLISHER is the second pattern: 365 people used that word as employer, and the grouped total is $7,681,847. The figure is not Random House, Penguin, or any single house’s payroll export.

A donor who listed a specific imprint, a newspaper legal name, or WRITER sits in another row. Occupation pages can show titles stored beside a house name. This page stays on the four-word employer key PUBLISHER as indexed from FEC.gov.

The FEC does not validate whether the filer owned a house, sat on a masthead, or used PUBLISHER as a shorthand. Grouping is string equality after LobbyVault’s industry rollup. That is why a named newspaper and this four-word key can describe similar work and still never share a total.

365 donors and 17,128 itemized lines

365 unique donors produced 17,128 PUBLISHER contribution lines totaling $7,681,847. That is on the order of 47 itemized receipts per donor. Recurring itemized gifts, cycle-to-cycle repeats, and multiple committees can produce that ratio. The packet does not publish a mean gift or a split among books, magazines, and newspapers.

Party share is not on the industry headline. Independent expenditures and any publishing-house committee filings are outside the $7,681,847 unless an individual receipt itself carries this employer string. Unitemized gifts never appear.

Among 17,128 lines, some donors appear once and some appear across cycles. The 365-person unique-donor count is a distinct-person rollup on this string, not a year-by-year employment survey. Researchers who need cycle splits must use the table, not this headline.

Questions

How much have PUBLISHER-listed donors given federally?

LobbyVault attributes $7,681,847 to the PUBLISHER employer string, from 17,128 contributions and 365 donors. These are itemized individual receipts, not a publishing-house PAC and not a NAICS media total. Unitemized gifts and non-federal filings are omitted. Figures on this answer are limited to that FEC employer string as indexed on LobbyVault.

Is PUBLISHER a company or a job title on FEC forms?

On this row it functions as employer text: 365 donors typed PUBLISHER where filers usually put a firm. It is not a single company’s treasury and not an industry code. People who listed a named imprint or WRITER sit in other rows. Figures are limited to the FEC string as indexed on LobbyVault; unitemized gifts are omitted.

Does this include every writer or newspaper employee?

No. WRITER and named newspaper or house strings are separate keys. A receipt counted here carries the grouped text PUBLISHER. Staff who typed only a company legal name are in those other rows. Figures on this answer are limited to that FEC employer string as indexed on LobbyVault.

How many unique donors listed PUBLISHER?

The rollup counts 365 donors and 17,128 contribution lines. Repeat gifts raise the receipt count. This is not a headcount of working publishers in the United States. Figures are limited to the FEC string as indexed on LobbyVault; unitemized gifts and non-federal filings are omitted.