Stats on articles and posts for #Groggate

Some people know that I've been tracking the posts and articles published online discussing the outing of the author of the Grog's Gamut blog by The Australian.

EDIT - due to updates to the spreadsheet below the figures presented in this section of the post are only valid at the original time of publication. Please refer to the spreadsheet for the latest figures.

So far I have listed 112 posts and articles on the topic (including this one) - although a few only touch on it peripherally.

I have also been mapping these articles into a Google spreadsheet to look at some of the interesting statistics behind the debate.

For instance, News Limited is responsible for 12.5% of the articles on the topic, Crikey for 8.9%, the ABC for 5.4% and Fairfax for 3.6% (excluding any duplication across publications). In fact a total of 32.1% of the articles have been written by commercial news sources.

It also appears that very few authors were anonymous, despite certain claims in mainstream media articles about a prevailing culture of anonymous blogging online.

57.1% of authors were named outright in their articles and posts. Another 29.5% used partial names or pseudonyms, but provided various pieces of personal information. In most cases their names could be uncovered without much research or effort.

The remaining 13.4% were indeed anonymous - totally unnamed in their articles and posts.

However of this group 4 articles, or 3.6%, were in mainstream and online commercial media publications (such as The Australian and Crikey) where no author name was provided. These are sometimes termed 'editorials', but are anonymous all the same.

Here's a few examples:

• The Australian - A storm on the internet: Why should web writers escape scrutiny and responsibility? (and yes I see the irony) 
•  Crikey - The Oz’s Bolt loose … science of pop-news …

Only the remaining 11 articles or 9.8%, were totally anonymous. This includes two articles from Mumbrella, which I only excluded from being a commercial publication as it is industry specific and doesn't charge subscribers as Crikey does (sorry Tim!)

On that basis,

• Of the 36 commercial articles and posts, 4 were anonymous - 11% of the total
• Of the 76 professional and personal articles and posts 11 were anonymous - 14.5% of the total.

That's a very small statistical difference in the scheme of things.

I recommend having a play with the data - any interesting insights please share via comments below.

The link to the public spreadsheet is here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Ap1exl80wB8OdE96TkhYT2U2UDNCUV9KaXVRS1FoNnc&output=html

Use the tabs at top to navigate to the statistics and legend (explaining the terms I've used)

Or simply look at the figures below: