Very interesting stats on the sources used in the news from Daily Kos:.
Shameless promotion: Now if all this source would have been linked with rel=”source”. How easy and transparent would all this have been.
Whenever we debate the future of newspapers, inevitably someone asks, “if they go out of business, where will blogs get their stories?” That’s a companion argument to “who will conduct investigative journalism”? Well, just as a wide range of journalistic enterprises are conducting investigative reporting (including online news outlets, television stations, and advocacy groups), so too will we get our news from a variety of different sources. In fact, we already do.
Out of curiosity, I decided to see where the news we discuss on this site came from the past week, from Monday, April 6, to Sunday, April 12. If we linked to a source that got its information from another site, we followed the links until we got to the original source of the reporting (“secondary” source). In other words, I wanted to categorize the original source of information for every (front page) post on the site. Here’s the results of that link inventory:
Newspapers: 102 primary, 21 secondary
Blogs: 83 primary, 19 secondary
Advocacy organizations: 77 primary, 9 secondary
Television network: 69 primary, 14 secondary
Online news organizations: 54 primary, 5 secondary
Magazines and journals: 36 primary
Political trade press: 28 primary
Research/polling: 20 primary
Wikipedia: 21 primary, 8 secondary
Educational (.edu): 15 primary
Government: 14 primary, 5 secondary
Campaigns: 13 primary
Books: 6 primary
AP and other Wire: 5 secondary
Radio: 4 primary