Anonymous source tracker
Continuously updated examples of the media's use of anonymous sources
China Overseas Land & Investment Ltd. (688) has hired four banks to arrange investor meetings in Hong Kong and Singapore ahead of a possible dollar bond sale, a person familiar with the matter said. The company picked Deutsche Bank AG, JPMorgan Chase ...
Bloomberg
Without Harris, the deal's value will drop by several billion dollars, according to a person familiar with the matter. The agreement is “beyond fixing,” said George Goehl, executive director of National People's Action, a network of community ...
Bloomberg
Meanwhile, Yahoo is in talks to sell stakes in China's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Yahoo Japan Corp., a person close to the matter said last month. More Volume Hewlett-Packard added activist investor Ralph Whitworth to its board Nov.
Chicago Sun-Times
“It's every family's nightmare — on both sides of the story,” said a friend of Olaska who asked not to be named. The friend said Olaska had a religious upbringing and lives at home in Naperville with his parents. Olaska, who has a master's degree in ...
Blacktown Sun
''Our family has been through absolute hell,'' the mother, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Sun. ''A lot of people have been hurt and we feel we have been psychologically trashed.'' The mother of three said she felt justice had been done by the ...
Dayton Daily News
Other neighbors who did not want to be identified said it was as bad as any accident they've seen at the intersection before. Most of the time, the accidents happen there because of people not paying attention, a neighbor said.
kwgn.com
The father, who did not want to be identified, says his daughter went to the Colorado School of Healing Arts in Lakewood for her first ever professional massage. "The massage started with her on her belly, he quickly went all the way up her legs,” he ...
Globe and Mail
One senior official, speaking on background, suggested that Canada's signature on a TPP treaty would amount to a whole new free trade agreement between Canada and the US, stripping away all of the protections the Mulroney government secured in the ...
Bloomberg
The central bank asked banks to submit orders for one-year, three-month, 91- and 28-day repurchase contracts this morning, according to two traders at primary dealers, who declined to be identified because the information isn't public.
Bloomberg
National supervisors will likely discuss the sovereign buffer, according to one of the people, a senior EU official, who declined to be identified because the talks are private. The EBA told banks to raise 114.7 billion euros ($150.5 billion) in fresh ...
The Zimbabwe Standard
“They are the in-thing,” said a man who requested anonymity. “Many of my friends have told me about them and how good they are. I intend to try them in my next relationship as I currently do not have a girlfriend.” There are unconfirmed reports that ...
New York Times
A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report's findings, saying “targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.” The official added: “One must ...
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 |