You must read a truly fascinating piece of work by Nate Silver on his blog.
It's a lengthy piece about the merits of the New York Times charging for access to its online content in which he asks a simple question and sets out to find a coherent answer.
Are there "substitutes" for the NY Times? If so, what are they? To that end, he has carried a study. It has imperfections, which he readily concedes, but it does give an interesting snapshot.
His conclusion: there are virtually no substitutes. He writes:
"A very small number of news outlets account for a very large share of the English-language reporting that is of national or international interest.
And with very few exceptions, they are all what we might think of as "traditional" news organisations."
To carry out his study, he tracked the number of times that a publication's name, when it appeared in Google News and Google Blog Search over the period of a month, was followed by the word "reported."
"For instance, to track the number of citations for the Chicago Tribune, I'd look for instances of the phrase 'Chicago Tribune reported.'
(In some cases, I've permitted multiple search terms for the same news outlet — for example, both 'BBC reported' and 'BBC News reported.')"
He accepted that there are other ways that a news site's reporting might be referenced. For example: "according to The Guardian" as opposed to "The Guardian reported", but maintains that his is a credible representative sample.
He tallied the citations for 260 different news outlets. The list included all blogs ranked in the Technorati top 100, all newspapers ranked in the top 100 in daily US circulation, all English-language newspapers ranking in the top 100 in global circulation, and all news sources in the Memorandum top 100.
He also included another 25 or so outlets, like the Financial Times, that didn't meet any of these criteria, but which he thought belonged in the discussion. "The list isn't absolutely comprehensive," he admitted, "but it ought to do a pretty good job."
The result? The 30 most cited outlets were topped by the Associated Press, with 7,388 citations. NY Times was second (6,6715) and Reuters was third (4,995).
The next 12 places run in the following order: Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, BBC, AFP, CNN, Washington Post, TMZ, Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Financial Times. (The long list is here).
"Collectively," he writes, "just eight of the 260 organisations accounted for more than half the citations for reporting."
These consisted of four wire services (two of which concentrate on financial news), two TV networks and two newspapers, the WSJ and the NY Times.
So the Times, and to some extent the Washington Post, which is ranked ninth, are relatively unique (The Guardian was twelfth). Silver writes:
"Largely absent from the list are organisations that began without some broadcast or print component."
The only (sort of) exception is TMZ, which did begin as a Time-Warner site, and has become a dominant presence in reporting on celebrity news.
The other online outlets that do relatively well include the Huffington Post (no. 37), TechCrunch (47), and Mashable (59).
Silver's concern is that the kind of reporting featured on the most accessed sites "doesn't come cheaply" and that "the traditional way of subsidising this reporting — through monopoly profits on print advertising — is not working as well as it used to."
So he offers his study as a defence for the NY Times's decision to charge for access to some of its content.
Source: FiveThirtyEight/New York Times
