The headline is about the Times paywall, but this is the story of an awful Pew study. The suggestion nehind the headline is that since bloggers use the Times so much, the Times will suffer when it closes its doors. And I agree. But then the post notes that, "A new study on news and social media from the (Pew) Project for Excellence in Journalism... found, bloggers draw on a handful of traditional-media sources for their links. Remarkably, just four outlets account for a full 80% of those links: the BBC, CNN, the Times and the Washington Post." According to Pew, 99 percent of all blog links are to these news outlets, which is simply not believable. Pew would have us believe blogs almost never link to each other, which is simply false. What explains this? The Pew data is based on IceRocket. The IceRocket data, in turn, records "top stories posted in the blogosphere, measured by new links to Official News Sources in the last 48 hours." Yes, if you don't count links to non-traditional sources, then 99 percent of your links will be to traditional sources. Proving exactly nothing. I trust Pew data less and less every day. Related: John Connell on paywall failings.
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