Still, something struck me about the piece, and now that I read it, this is what got me– the fact that you were counting the sources from the media piece the blog itself sourced. That doesn’t seem like an equitable comparison.

“This methodology was employed in order to measure

No more “it’s too complicated” to explain types of responses, no more concern about there not being enough room to say more. Just provide a link to the source and let the reader determine what is being said.

Newspapers with online counterparts could do a better job at offering such tools for the reader to use.

I’d need to see more of your data published. *Which* newspapers and *which* blogs did you look at? How many? How many articles? Since blogs are highly diverse, wouldn’t it be helpful for you to list the “deep-sourced” ones as a helpful guide to us OJR readers?

Also, it’s certainly fair to say that a dedicated interest blog is much more similar to a special interest trade journal than a newspaper. Why not compare to Stars & Stripes and the military Times (for one or all four of the branches)?

This sentence caught my eye:
“And perhaps as a tell-tale sign of what the mainstream press really thinks of the blogosphere, just two percent of newspaper stories used a blog as a source.”

That’s a bit of editorializing, wouldn’t you agree? I spoke to a Pentagon correspondent last year when doing research for a report on milblogs. I asked her about whether she followed any blogs. She did follow Riverbend in Iraq, but couldn’t quite distinguish among many of the stateside blogs, many of which were mostly derivative (quoting another blogger quoting a newspaper, etc.)

There is NO STANDARD WAY in RSS for a publisher to mark whether a story is original or derivative. That explains why it’s difficult to find original reporting within the blogosphere.