As a followup to my post from a couple of weeks ago on supporting good journalism, I thought I’d post a link to a website I discovered a year or so ago. You may have seen the graphics from this website on social media. The site’s owner has developed a valuable methodology for evaluating news media.
When looking at an article or post, it is important to be able to evaluate the reliability of the information. I’m sure most of use do this intuitively to some degree. For example, I know to take articles from Huffington Post with a small grain of salt. And that Occupy Democrats or The Rebel are mostly political rallying points with little news value.
Venessa Oterro’s website, Ad Fontes Media (Latin for “from the source”), examines two important elements of media outlets. The first is the amount of left-right bias. The second is a measurement of the news value of the content. The site is regularly updated with revisions to the chart. Oterro also discusses how she develops her rankings and posts insights into why various sites earn their ranks.
The site’s content is, unfortunately, almost entirely American with a smattering of British media. I think, however, that most people can derive their own evaluations of Canadian media from her analysis.