Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
The President's and Prime Minister's offices are also not safe,” a senior government official said quoting intelligence reports. A top government official ...
Reuters
KS), according to a person familiar with the matter. JPMorgan is charging about 0.3 percent of the total value of the transaction, the person said. ...
San Francisco Chronicle
Menlo Ventures, meanwhile, is trying to raise $600 million to $800 million for a new fund, a person familiar with the matter said last week. ...
Chicago Tribune
One prominent Northwest Side committeeman, who asked not to be identified because of the early stage of the campaigns, said the measure of those candidates ...
Daily Breeze
The patient, who requested anonymity, says he doesn't think about much during the treatments and he can usually hold himself still. ...
The Star-Ledger - NJ.com
The person requested anonymity because the team had not announced the transaction. O'Connell tore his labrum during the preseason, as previously reported, ...
Times of India
"There is also a shortage of good actors, especially female ones, with so many troupes participating," a source said. Some tiatr groups are not happy about ...
The Sun
And last night a source said: "Lily said she found out from a scan she is having a boy. "She is really excited and can't wait to give birth. ...
Chicago Sun-Times
The 16-year-old was wearing a "school uniform" when he was shot, a source said. Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman Monique Bond said the 16-year-old was a ...
New York Times
But administration officials said they believed it was unlikely a candidate from outside the West Wing would be selected. The president has given his ...
Bloomberg
SABMiller is working with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to study Foster's beer business, Australia's largest, according to a person with direct knowledge of the ...
Reuters
HK) plans a $150 million bond issue at 13.75 to 14 percent, a source close to the proposed deal said on Thursday. The bond could be priced as early as ...
About the tracker
The goal of the anonymous source tracker is to make the media's use of anonymous sources more transparent. It's an experiment, and as such it's imperfect and subject to change.
While it finds many examples of the use of anonymous sources, it doesn't find all anonymous sources used by newspapers, magazines, TV stations, wire services or other news outlets online.
It gets its examples from the English version of Google News. Phrases commonly used to identify anonymous sources are fed to Google News, which produces an Atom feed for each phrase. Those feeds are then combined under a single label, "anonymous," in Google Reader. That feed is public. Every hour a PHP script grabs the Google Reader feed, extracts the summary text, highlights the anonymous source phrasing, and puts it in a database to display on the anonymous source tracker.
Some examples are rejected, even though the articles they point to used anonymous sources, because the anonymous source phrasing isn't in the summary.
Some examples are duplicates. If a URL is already in the database, those examples are rejected. But sometimes the same story can have different URLs, so the same story can appear more than once. The same wire story may also be run by multiple outlets.
The news outlets scanned are the same outlets scanned by Google News. I don't know what criteria Google News uses to decide whether to include a Web site.
Typically Google returns a search result for a phrase giving a summary for only one outlet, with an "and more" link pointing to other matches for stories on the same subject. The anonymous source tracker doesn't grab those "and more" results, so many examples are undoubtedly missed.
I don't know how Google does what it does or why, or why one outlet is given prominence for a given search while another isn't, so I don't know if all outlets are being treated equally by the anonymous source tracker.
The count for each news outlet doesn't include every anonymously sourced story produced by that outlet. The counts shouldn't be considered valid rankings.
To quote Donald Rumsfeld, "there are known unknowns."
"That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know."
| BusinessWeek | 3,099 |
| Wall Street Journal | 2,786 |
| Reuters | 2,123 |
| The Associated Press | 1,231 |
| New York Times | 969 |
| Washington Post | 757 |
| Bloomberg | 756 |
| New York Daily News | 449 |
| AFP | 414 |
| Financial Times | 377 |
| Los Angeles Times | 365 |
| New York Times (blog) | 340 |
| Economic Times | 331 |
| Livemint | 329 |
| ESPN | 308 |
| New York Post | 302 |
| San Francisco Chronicle | 242 |
| Boston Globe | 226 |
| Hindustan Times | 208 |
| CNN | 192 |
| ABC News | 174 |
| Philadelphia Inquirer | 172 |
| San Jose Mercury News | 171 |
| Washington Post (blog) | 165 |
| FOXNews | 160 |
| The Star-Ledger - NJ.com | 156 |
| Times of India | 152 |
| Wall Street Journal (blog) | 145 |
| Los Angeles Times (blog) | 143 |
| MiamiHerald.com | 130 |
| Chicago Sun-Times | 129 |
| Sydney Morning Herald | 129 |
| Business Standard | 127 |
| Chicago Tribune | 122 |
| The Guardian | 120 |
| Reuters India | 118 |
| MarketWatch | 117 |
| Reuters Africa | 115 |
| Boston Herald | 114 |
| Daily Mail | 114 |
| Examiner.com | 112 |
| UPI.com | 110 |
| Detroit Free Press | 109 |
| Globe and Mail | 107 |
| msnbc.com | 106 |
| Seattle Times | 105 |
| Xinhua | 105 |
| CNN International | 102 |
| Sify | 101 |
| Telegraph.co.uk | 100 |

