Another perspective is that the way news sources and gathering is changing. Nate looks at the number of citations and draws some good conclusions - but I think

Another perspective is that the way news sources and gathering is changing. Nate looks at the number of citations and draws some good conclusions - but I think he misses something important. News aggregators, such as YC and Reddit sometimes link stories from New York Times, Bloomberg and Al Jazeera, but at any one time one of the big news outlets will be a small minority on the frontpage. Most of the content comes from blogs, smaller sites, comments somewhere and specific sites associated with a news event. For instance, the recent nuclear disaster has been covered here on HN, but the links are often to sites that are somewhat specific to the event in questions. In this case sites like worldnuclearnews.org (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348824 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348824) and theenergycollective (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317356 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317356). Chances are that I will never visit these sites again, but for this one event they were indespensible. If there was a biological terrorist attack in Copenhagen next week there's a good chance that The Copenhagen Post (http://www.cphpost.dk/ http://www.cphpost.dk/) would make the frontpage of both Reddit and HN, but in there is not it won't. It's only an interesting source for very specific events. The Internet is changing news, and I don't think Nate's analysis takes that into consideration, small sites won't show up in his analysis since they're typically only quoted in relation to one story. Because of News aggregators I don't get much of my news from the traditional outlets - I get it from experts on the particular piece of news I'm reading about. That expert may be wikipedia, it may be worldnuclearnews or it may be The copenhagen Post. The important thing is instead of getting a lot of my news from one source I get it from all over the place depending on what's happening in the world. Besides I've often seen big news organizations pinch stories from Reddit without any attribution.