Top Sources of 2009

Where did the NewsTrust community get its most reliable coverage in 2009?

To find out, we've created a special page featuring our Top Sources of 2009!

Our most trusted sources are listed on that page, based on the thousands of story reviews our members contributed throughout the year. We highlighted the news and opinion sources that have most consistently earned our trust in a range of categories: overall, by content type,  by media type, and by topic. Mainstream and Independent sources are listed separately in each category, to ensure more diversity in our listings.

The top sources in each category have earned a well-deserved stamp of approval from the NewsTrust community for their work in 2009. We recommend them highly and are very grateful for all that they do to keep citizens informed through quality journalism.

Top Sources - Overall
This main category features sources which provided the best overall coverage in 2009, with the most reviews and the highest ratings. To qualify in this category, mainstream sources needed to have 100 rated stories or more, independent sources 50 or more.

For mainstream, four major U.S. newspapers were the clear leaders, while online sources offered the top independent coverage:

Top Mainstream Sources
New York Times
Washington Post
Los Angeles Times
Wall Street Journal

Top Independent Sources
Salon
Alternet
Huffington Post

More Top Sources
To reward more trusted sources, we created additional categories for News and Opinion. Sources featured in the Overall category were excluded from these listings, to ensure diversity in our listings. The New Yorker and FactCheck led our lists for their outstanding news coverage and analysis, while The Guardian and TruthOut had the most reviews and the highest ratings in the opinion category.

Top Sources by Medium
In our second group, we looked at top sources by medium: newspapers, magazines, online sites, blogs, TV, radio and wire services. For each category, we looked at top rated and most reviewed sources to find out which sources were most trusted by our community. Most of our top sources from the Overall group were featured prominently here as well; but our community also surfaced many lesser-known sources: Asia Times, Link TV, Miller-McCune, Informed Comment, Radio Free Europe and more.

Editors Picks by Topic
NewsTrust editors also selected top sources that provided the best coverage by topic -- with separate categories for World, U.S., Politics, Business and Sci/Tech subject areas -- as well as some of 2009's hottest topics: Afghanistan, Climate Change, Health Care, Obama Administration, U.S. Congress and U.S. Economy. For these topic listings, we selected two top sources, after a thorough review of our community's collective ratings: one mainstream and one independent source.

Methodology
The top sources above were selected based on their average story ratings for each category in the last year, from Dec. 16 2008 to Dec. 15, 2009. To qualify for selection, all top sources required a minimum source rating of 3.0 overall. Selected stories generally had a source rating of 3.5 or more, and many had source ratings of 4.0 or more in their featured category. Lastly, our top sources required a minimum number of rated stories to be selected. Required minimums varied for each category, to spotlight the most reviewed sources in top categories, and to insure diversity in the smaller categories. For a full description of our methodology, click here.

Political Views
NewsTrust welcomes a wide range of political viewpoints on our site, but so far we have attracted more members from the left than the right - despite our best efforts to attract participants and partners from the other side of the political spectrum. As a result, many of our top sources tend to reflect this leftward tilt, particularly in the opinion category. Over time, we hope to attract more reviewers from the right and center, to help restore the balance and present more diverse political views on NewsTrust. If you know conservatives, libertarians or moderates that would be interested in our mission, please invite them to review actively on our site, where we will do our best to make them feel welcome. In coming years, we hope that NewsTrust can bring people with different viewpoints closer together and that we can all learn from each other, across party lines.

Check our Site
Did your favorite sources make our list? Who else had the best world coverage? The best opinions? To find out more, check out the full listings of this year's winners visit our Top Sources of 2009 page. Note that we also list our top sources on our most popular topic pages (e.g. Environment). You can find these listings in the right sidebar of many of our topic pages.

And for a running list of our top sources at any time of year, visit our Trusted Sources page.


Congratulations to all our top sources this year, for their outstanding coverage of important public issues - and for helping all of us make more informed decisions as citizens!

-- by Derek Hawkins, Kaizar Campwala, Fabrice Florin, David Fox, Subbu Sastry and the NewsTrust Team