The top journalism blogs, in English
This is a vanity post, pure and simple.
Paul Bradshaw, who writes a blog called Online Journalism Blog, compiled a list he titled Are these the ten most popular journalism bloggers in America?
In his first draft, this very blog came in at No. 6 (w00t!!). But then Paul realized he had omitted Romenesko and MediaShift (both huge), so that would make this blog No. 8. Still okay by me.
Paul was inspired in part by a November post by his fellow Brit blogger Adrian Monck titled Britain’s Top Ten Journo-Bloggers.
Above is a screen capture from Journalism Daily on Dec. 13, 2007. This list changes every day. The site uses an algorithm called Social Rank to calculate “the hottest stories and bloggers every day” in a variety of categories (which are listed at the Social Rank site). It’s not equivalent to what Paul was doing, which was adding up RSS feed subscriptions for the various blogs.
Another way to survey the top journalism blogs is via Technorati’s authority rankings. You’ll see more than 5,000 blogs in the list, with a top authority score of about 3,500. The sort doesn’t always work perfectly, so if it seems kind of random when you try it, bookmark it and go back another day. Many of these blogs might not qualify as journalism blogs in your mind (many don’t in mine).
An unranked list of blogs published independently by journalists (including this one) is available at CyberJournalist.
Lastly, I tried looking up some numbers for popular blogs about journalism in Alexa, which delivers traffic rankings “based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period” ( “a combined measure of reach and pageviews”). But that was not very useful:
- BuzzMachine.com has a traffic rank of 80,713
- mindymcadams.com has a traffic rank of 434,596 (can’t break out /tojou/)
- Onlinejournalismblog.com has a traffic rank of 841,509
- Jay Rosen’s PressThink: Can’t break it out from parent site nyu.edu
- MediaShift: Can’t break it out from parent site PBS.org
- Romenesko: Can’t break it out from parent site Poynter.org
It just goes to show that measuring Web site traffic is still a fuzzy process. I think Paul’s method of totaling RSS subscribers for each blog is a pretty fair way to compare blogs to blogs, but it won’t necessarily work well for other kinds of content.
TechCrunch recently wrote about how useless Alexa is, so I ignore it now. And Technorati is hugely idiosyncratic. Some links on Journalism Daily I need to check out, though!
December 14, 2007 at 4:42 amNumber 6! W00t indeed
December 14, 2007 at 6:28 am[...] McAdams has a “vanity post, pure and simple” about a kind of top rss/news/bloggers meme that Adrian, Martin and Paul have been kicking [...]
December 14, 2007 at 6:36 amI have always felt skeptical about Alexa because it only counts people who have the Allexa toolbar installed, and I don’t know ANYONE who has it! I installed it yesterday to do my little project and then discovered it only works at the domain level. I missed the TechCrunch post but I’m glad someone has taken a closer look.
December 14, 2007 at 7:55 amI like Social Rank because it tracks how a blog is doing now, not in the past. If you just measure RSS subscriptions, you’ll find that many of those subscriptions are dormant or for people who don’t blog very often.
Adrian Holovaty has blogged about 2 times in the past 6 months. I’m not sure how big of a journalism blogger he is anymore, but he has a lot of people signed up for RSS feeds.
But most of the lists I have seen seem pretty accurate, at least at the top.
I have no idea what tomorrow brings, but I’ll take the No. 35 spot for The Journalism Iconoclast after less than 6 months of postings.
December 14, 2007 at 6:00 pm