Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
From its launch in 1993 through 2010, PDT, which invests only Morgan Stanley money, has returned an estimated annual average of more than 20 percent, according to a person close to the group. Gorman has also been getting rid of the clutter the bank ...
BusinessWeek
6 (Bloomberg) -- Multimedia Polska SA's owners are seeking to sell the Polish cable-television operator and have hired JPMorgan Chase & Co. to manage the transaction, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna reported, citing a person close to the transaction it didn't ...
New York Post
Cuomo and Senate Republicans are on a collision course that could soon return state government to the “chaos of past years,” sources close to both sides have told The Post. Republicans are threatening to hold up key elements of Cuomo's 2012 agenda ...
Forbes
Amazon.com is planning to open a retail store in Seattle in the new few months, the blog Good E-Reader reports, citing “sources close to the situation.” The site asserts that the store will focus on selling Kindle e-readers, the Kindle Fire tablet, ...
Reuters
Negotiators from both nations, however, are expected to hold talks as early as this week to resolve the payments dispute, the sources said, adding that the European Union embargo on Iranian crude gave China an advantage in any talks.
Reuters
The restructuring would involve the design, construction and services units of Sinopec Group's engineering businesses, the sources said. "It may take another half year to complete the complicated restructuring and set up a new company," said a source ...
The Daily Telegraph
"Casper is taking acting lessons because Jennifer wants him to be a star,” a source said. "She thinks it might be fun to act alongside him the way she has done in the past with her ex-fiance Ben Affleck and Marc Anthony, her former husband.
Los Angeles Times
... Angeles Times With a Monday deadline at hand, California officials have resumed direct talks with the Obama administration about joining a multibillion-dollar, multi-state mortgage settlement with the nation's largest banks, a source said Sunday.
Reuters
said a housewife in Kermanshah, who declined to give her name. Reza Khaleghi, who owns a small grocery store in the central city of Karaj near Tehran, said gloomily: "Because of sanctions prices are increasing almost every day.
Wall Street Journal
The treasury head of a private-sector bank, who declined to be named, said the Reserve Bank of India has eased limits on the so-called daylight positions as well as unhedged foreign currency positions that his bank can hold overnight.
Times of India
According to a source close to the actress, it wasn't the second male lead but 'uncertainties' around the project that forced the actress to finally opt out of the film. "Kareena, who had already committed to the Balaji production was not very happy ...
Philadelphia Inquirer
According to a source close to the situation, the actress is in a facility and not at home in Los Angeles, as some have speculated. "She's on total lockdown and only talking to a small group of people," a source tells E!, adding that the actress is ...
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."
| Wall Street Journal | 8,141 |
| Reuters | 6,916 |
| BusinessWeek | 6,335 |
| Bloomberg | 5,684 |
| New York Times | 2,944 |
| Washington Post | 2,641 |
| The Associated Press | 2,061 |
| Los Angeles Times | 1,502 |
| San Francisco Chronicle | 1,408 |
| New York Daily News | 1,218 |
| New York Post | 1,199 |
| AFP | 1,133 |
| Livemint | 1,111 |
| Economic Times | 1,099 |
| Times of India | 1,059 |
| Financial Times | 1,030 |
| ESPN | 1,024 |
| Hindustan Times | 888 |
| Reuters Africa | 855 |
| New York Times (blog) | 837 |
| Patch.com | 755 |
| Boston Globe | 664 |
| The Star-Ledger - NJ.com | 633 |
| Wall Street Journal (blog) | 590 |
| CNN International | 558 |
| Chicago Sun-Times | 547 |
| Daily Mail | 526 |
| Chicago Tribune | 519 |
| San Jose Mercury News | 518 |
| Washington Post (blog) | 516 |
| CNN | 492 |
| Business Standard | 479 |
| Sydney Morning Herald | 470 |
| Philadelphia Inquirer | 453 |
| msnbc.com | 431 |
| ABC News | 414 |
| The News International | 411 |
| The Guardian | 409 |
| MiamiHerald.com | 379 |
| Monsters and Critics.com | 375 |
| UPI.com | 367 |
| Inquirer.net | 363 |
| Daily News & Analysis | 362 |
| NASDAQ | 361 |
| Detroit Free Press | 355 |
| Xinhua | 346 |
| Fox News | 343 |
| Sify | 343 |
| Salon | 328 |
| Reuters India | 326 |