Original reporting featured in 13% of posts in Technorati Top 10 blogs; TechCrunch contains highest ratio
I recently surveyed all the front page posts on Technorati’s top 10 most popular blogs and found that approximately 13% of the posts involved some kind of original reporting. I loosely defined original reporting as pulling any data that wasn’t already freely available on the web. So if a blogger called a source, emailed a source, sat on a conference call, published a news tip, or found any information that wasn’t easily available through a Google search, I marked it as original reporting.
Rather than setting a date range, over the course of several days last week I simply surveyed all the posts that were available on the front page when I accessed the site. I surveyed 216 blog posts, and of those, 28 contained some kind of original reporting, while the remaining 188 where simply commenting on a news item or linking to another website.
Of those surveyed, TechCrunch had the highest ratio of posts that involved original reporting (37%), while Ars Technica came in a close second (35%). Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and Daily Kos did not have front page posts with original reporting on the days I surveyed them.
The individual stats are published below:
Huffington Post
Original: 7 (18%)
Unoriginal: 32 (82%)
TechCrunch
Original: 7 (37%)
Unoriginal: 12 (63%)
Engadget
Original: 2 (13%)
Unoriginal: 13 (87%)
Gizmodo
Original: 0 (0%)
Unoriginal: 30 (100%)
BoingBoing
Original: 3 (11%)
Unoriginal: 25 (89%)
Life Hacker
Original: 0 (0%)
Unoriginal: 32 (100%)
The Official Google Blog
Original: 1 (9%)
Unoriginal: 10 (91%)
Daily Kos
Original: 0 (0%)
Unoriginal: 16 (100%)
Ars Technica
Original: 6 (35%)
Unoriginal: 11 (65%)
Smashing Magazine
Original: 2 (22%)
Unoriginal: 7 (78%)
Total original: 28 (13%)
Total unoriginal: 188 (87%)
So?
How does these rates compare to the average traditional print newspaper? Many of these consist largely of AP articles with a local news and opinion section.
You define original reporting “as pulling any data that wasn’t already freely available on the web.” That’s far too narrow a definition. A lot of the most important reporting involves collecting data that’s freely available, connecting the pieces, finding the patterns, providing the context, and helping people understand its meaning. Calling up a source to get a quote can provide important information. It can just as well provide misinformation that needs to be corrected by comparing it to “data freely available on the web.” Both kinds of reporting are original reporting.
“the remaining 188 where simply commenting on a news item”
Isn’t that what a lot of blogging is about? People follow certain blogs because they are interested in the authors comments, not neccasarily because they expect new and original news.
Have a couple of questions that I’m curious how you would answer:
1. Shouldn’t wire stories be counted against print media, as they contain no original reporting. — And regarding the question of paid, if “fair use” is respected in a blog post and the original story is linked to, then ad revenue is generated on the sources sight, resulting in a form of payment.
2. About freely available. Seems a more rigid structure needs to be applied than being “easily available through a Google search.” A lot of information is out there on Google, but some can take intensive querying. — I suppose the debate is, do you mean “information was easily found using any number of Google searches” or “information was found using an easy Google search?”
3. General question: Say the blog post is about two articles that both talk about one subject, say a restaurant review. One review likes the eatery, one doesn’t. Now say the blog post is about the comparative differences. Does that qualify as original reporting? Is reporting synonymous with analysis? (but not sheer opinion).
In closing, I find your argument and metric interesting. I know I’m being critical, but only in the hope of furthering the dialogue.
Interesting! Have you ever read Susan Herring et. al.’s “Women and children last: the discursive construction of the blogosphere”? In it, the authors talk about how “filter blogs ” — ones that report and comment on things that happen elsewhere — are privileged over personal-experience blogs. Looks like your results are consistent with that!
@Mark Drapeau
With all due respect, what do you mean, “so?”
You don’t find metrics like this interesting? Why are you writing for Mashable again?
Data like this supports my puzzlement when people say “citizen journalism” doesn’t exist (or that only people working for MSM can be “journalists”.) I do wonder what the numbers would have shown if tracked over, say a year.
Tim O’Reilly tweets this to suggest that the Top 10 is an “echo chamber”.
I don’t think that necessarily follows, but it’s not clear from the report here. Perhaps it is in your actual analysis?
How much of the posting in those Top 10 Blogs represent links *to each other*, and/or links to the same external sites, and/or similar commentary on the external events? In other words, just how much of an “echo chamber” *is* this Top 10 (or top 100, or whatever reasonably small pool)?
Also, I have to question your definition of “original reporting.” Just because something is “on the web” or even “available in a Google search” doesn’t make it visible. Plenty of “original reporting” by traditional journalists involves bringing public records — “freely available” to anyone asking for it! — to light, because they’ve thought to ask for it. Thinking to do the right Google search, or in coming years, to run the right query over the Web of Linked Data (a/k/a the Semantic Web), seems to me no less “original” if few or no others have asked the same question.
Interesting. I work very hard to not have original content. But sometimes I just can’t help it.
Hey, that’s up from 6 percent when we did a similar study in 2005. Here’s a link to the PDF.
Hello Simon,
What is th point of this study other than dissing on fellow bloggers?
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2009/02/truth-about-cats-and-dogs-original.html
Although your work is fine and may be well meaning, but it only plays into the hands of all those blog-baiters out there who think blogs have nothing good to offer.
It would have been better for yu to explain why you were doing what you did, just saying “it is a metric doesn’t cut it.”
You know, I know and all other bloggers know how tiresome and futile the charge of ‘merely opinionating’ is.
Original Opinion and Analysis will have its merit and that’s something your ‘cute’ post doesn’t quite explain.
Look forward to reading about your next metric