What Blogs Reporters Read

Atrios and Unfogged link to Drezner's and Farrell's list of the blogs that reporters read.

I did a survey of reporters at four major newspapers last summer. As part of the survey, I asked them what blogs they read. I came up with a completely different list from Drezner and Farrell. Almost none of the reporters read Kos or Instapundit. They all read the smaller blogs that specialized in their particular beats. They also were big fans of TMZ.

The paper is out for review right now. If you all want to see the list of blogs that reporters read and my methodology, I can pull that together for you all.

Comments

[Amy P]

With regard to the housing bubble, it really is looking like thehousingbubbleblog.com has become a source for journalists covering the housing meltdown. This after apparently years of real estate agents being the main (sometimes only) experts cited in real estate stories. I don't know what turned the segment of the media that covers housing, but at some point they realized that it wasn't adequate to keep quoting people saying "It's a great time to buy!" and "It's different here." More and more nowadays, those kind of statements are balanced by cold hard fact.

[Doug]

The cynic in me wants to say that the turning point closely corresponded to a fall-off in advertising revenue for the papers' real estate sections. And don't look for many negative reviews in all those car sections either.

[WendyW]

I'd be interested, Laura. Looking forward to it.

I was part of an inservice this morning to talk about blogs and RSS readers. But I started off by talking about the world our students live in, the world of Web 2.0. I realized that though we (in education/higher ed) have been talking about student-centered classrooms for years, Web 2.0 is for the first time letting us really make it happen. One of my colleagues was talking about the wiki he uses and showing examples and it's just amazing how the students are using the medium. And these are students in a gen ed class at a non-liberal arts, non-elite school.

Anyway, your comment about how reporters read local blogs more than the "big" blogs got me thinking about this because the flow of information has really changed from being top to bottom to bottom to top. (Not assigning any moral value to top and bottom here.)

[MH]

Not that I'm a reporter or anything, but my blog reading is highly Instapundit centered. I found this through Drezner which I found off Instapundit. It is rare that I read a blog more than two clicks away from Instapundit. The exceptions are local Pittsburgh blogs that I found when I was googling for analysis of a recent local election.

[Russell Arben Fox]

I remember that you gave some specifics when you presented the paper last summer, Laura, but if I took any notes, I can't find them now. So put me down with Wendy; I'd like to be reminded of what your data uncovered.