Simon Owens has done a spot-check on the front page of the Huffington Post site, at 8pm on Tuesday June 2, to ascertain how many HuffPo headlines are of the reporters’ own making.
He explains how he defines ‘original reporting’ in the Bloggasm post, and here’s what he found:
“There were a total of 77 headlines on the front page of the Huffington Post when I conducted the survey. Of those, four headlines simply linked to news outlets offsite. There were five HuffPo stories that contained original reporting. There were 55 HuffPo stories that simply expressed opinion and/or summarized content from other outlets. The remaining 13 stories were reprinted wire copy.
“So this means that approximately 6 per cent of the HuffPo stories on the front page tonight contained original reporting. This is likely significantly fewer originally reported stories than you’d find on most major newspaper websites, including the New York Times, LA Times and the Washington Post.”