2005 Annual Report - Online Content Analysis

How well sourced is Internet journalism? That discussion might begin with the question of how much audiences can tell about the sources. First, as in print, we saw marked declines in the amount of anonymous sourcing on the Internet this year. Overall, 19% of the stories cited anonymous sources, down from 39% a year earlier.

The next question is how transparent the sourcing online is, or the degree to which sites offer information about sources that enables audiences to decide what they think of the information for themselves. Just slightly less than half of all stories (46%) reached the highest level of source transparency, at least four sources with a clear attempt to explain enough about the sources' knowledge, expertise and potential biases. There was little difference here among the sites.

This is less than what we saw on newspaper front-pages but substantially greater transparency than in network evening or morning news or cable.

Source Transparency, Online News vs. Other Outlets

Story Depth

The next question about sourcing is how many sides of the story are included. At least in the lead stories studied, the Internet stood out among the media studied for getting multiple viewpoints. Fully 85% of stories contained a mix of views. In addition, we counted how many different types of interest groups or stakeholders were cited, a slightly different way of looking at breadth of sourcing. Online, the majority of stories (56%) had at least four different stakeholder groups, and another 21% had three or more stakeholders.

That depth of sourcing exceeds even that found in newspapers, where 76% of stories offered a mix of opinions (82% of front-page stories) and 39% contained four or more stakeholders. No other medium studied even came close to reaching these levels.

Not only was this level of sourcing high among media studied, it was also fairly consistent across the sites examined.