2005 Annual Report - Newspaper Content Analysis

One of the most basic questions about the value of a work of journalism is the nature of its sourcing. How deep is the sourcing, what are the range of views offered, and how much can the audience decide for itself what to think about the story? These are essential elements in trying to assess the quality of reporting.

To break this down, we studied sourcing several ways.

First we measured how many sources a story contained. Then we measured how transparent the sourcing was - that is, the number of sources included, with their relationship to the story made clear. We measured the number of viewpoints a story contained. Finally, we measured how many different stakeholders, or affected interest groups, were consulted in the story - something different from viewpoints, since two different interest groups might hold the same view. Let's take these components of sourcing one at a time.

How Transparent Is the Sourcing?

We will start with the transparency of the sourcing, the degree to which the audience can see who the source was, what the source's level of expertise was and any possible biases the sources might have. The assumption here is that the more audiences learn about sources, the more they can judge for themselves what to make of those sources and thereby evaluate the information in the story.

Nearly half of all newspaper stories, 48%, contained the highest level of transparency - four or more sources that were fully identified. (When opinion columns are removed, the percentage rises just slightly, to 51%.) Front-page stories had even more, 64%, compared with 43% of the metro front and 34% of sports front.

In contrast, only 7% of newspaper stories studied across all sections contained no fully identified sources.

This is a much higher degree of transparency than we found in other media.

Source Transparency, Newspapers

There were differences, again, among papers of different circulation sizes. Larger papers tended to be more transparent about their sources than smaller papers. Looking at front pages, fully 80% at the largest papers contained four or more fully identified sources. This was twice the percentage of stories reaching that threshold than at the smallest-circulation papers (40%) and about a fifth more than at mid-sized papers (67%).

Anonymous Sourcing

Newspapers caught our attention this year also because of apparent low percentages of anonymous sourcing. Just 7% of all stories, and 13% of front-page stories, contained anonymous sources.

This is down markedly from a year ago, when 29% of stories contained at least one anonymous source.

As was also the case in 2003, the reliance on unnamed sources grew as the papers got bigger. Among the largest papers, 12% of all 2004 coverage contained anonymous sources, compared to just 3% at the smallest papers and 6% at mid-range papers.

On page A1, the gap was only slightly smaller - 20% at the largest-circulation papers, 7% at the smallest and 11% at mid-range.

How did newspapers compare to other media when it came to anonymous sourcing? Commercial network television news, evening and morning, was more likely to use anonymous sourcing (53% on commercial evening, 47% on the PBS NewsHour and 50% on morning).