Gabe Rivera’s latest leaderboard product Memeorandum Leaderboard is now live with some interesting results for the political blogosphere.
According to the list, based on story headlines on Memeorandum the New York Times, Washington Post and AP control over 22.4% of political headlines. The Atlantic Online, The National Review and CNN (twice) also make the top ten, leaving slim pickings for political blogs.
Arieanna Huffington’s The Huffington Post, a site believed by TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld to be heading towards an IPO, hits the list in 12th place.
The (perhaps sad) state of the political blogosphere stands in contrast to the tech blogosphere, which dominates the equivalent Techmeme Leaderboard list, holding approx 64% of all spots.
Naturally.
But no drudge report? I don’t think these “leaderboards” have much significance outside the echo chamber.
tom
I don’t follow the political blogosphere enough these days to 100% know why Drudge isn’t there, but at a guess doesn’t he only do 1 or 2 posts a day, and mostly links out the rest of the time? Hence he wouldn’t dominate headlines on a list like this.
Funny. I just built something like this a day or so ago. But it works slightly differrently. The emphasis with mine is what all bloggers and news types are writing about. I call it The Buzz Index.
I designed it so that a blogger can get noticed if he or she is talking about something that a lot of other people are talking about, no matter how new the blog is.
Techcrunch is in it.
But the list is not really a leaderboard or anything like that. Whereas Techcrunch’s goal might be to get exclusives or something like that and so making it on the list of keywords is not important, The Buzz Index is useful to bloggers and blog readers alike to see at a glance what is abuzz.
These political leader making new headline everyday, nothing new, they are not going to solve any problem, they will rearrange the problem only.
This clearly shows that the mainstream press overwhelmingly controls the policical news content we access every day. The numbers are signficant: a quarter of our news from three sources?! Despite the proliferation of social news sites, I still believe that average news reader still doesnt have easy access to a wide range of sources, and moreover, its increasingly difficult to find high quality, credible, vetted news amongst all the noise.
Techies and early adopters have sites like Digg, Reddit, TechMeme to turn to, but as Gabe’s leaderboard shows, its still heavily concentrated news from a small subset of all the great news sources out there (both mainstream and blogs). Where does that leave the rest of the online community? We’ve been blogging about this issue at NewsCred. We definately believe there is a solution out there…
Shafqat
(full disclosure, I’m a cofounder of NewsCred and very passionate about media credibility issues!)
The worst possible sources for truth leading the pack!
sheesh! depressing … Hellary is gonna win …
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
Michael Moore did some nice work about media in “Bowling for Columbine”, widely quoting Chomsky. And Gore has a nice run with his own stuff. I’d expect the movie space to close the educational gap people have about politics.
High quality news is very closely tied with education IMO. Movies are best positioned for this: high production budgets, and a captive audience sitting in a dark room for 2 hours with nothing else to do.
It’s a big challenge. But there’s enough kick-ass trivia to get a nice suspension of disbelief going. Before I read Chomsky I had no idea Saddam suggested to withdraw from Kuwait in 1991 and that this was censured in the US. I was VERY surprised.
Here’s the thing though, the Atlantic Website has a pay wall in front of the magazine content. What is available on the site are a series of very excellent blogs that run the entire gambit of the ideological spectrum, including Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan.
Similar deal with National Review. The Corner is their blog. They’re still big media, but those are definitely blogs.
I don’t think you can call the state of the political blogosphere “sad” because mainstream outlets have larger share.
More people care about politics than technology, so it’s a bigger market. Also, blog readers as a group are (believe it or not) disproportionately interested in the latter subject.
Mainstream news organizations have a larger share because they still have better distribution online than the blogs. This is particularly true for the general online community (i.e not counting techies/early adopters). When my parents go online, their options are limited — yahoo news, individual news websites (BBC) etc. I think that entire population is underserved when it comes to revelant, high quality news content and thus turn to the mainstream sources.
BTW slev makes a good point. Its becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between some of the mainstream sources and blogs. Given the size, influence and key hires, one could argue that the Huffington Post is one of the majors now.
Shafqat
http://www.newscred.com