The highest-rated tech reporter in the US is… an intern?

OwlFactor recently launched a website with ratings for 5000+ journalists across 50 publications. There are many surprising findings including that one for the top-rated technology reporters is Jasmin Boyce, an intern at NBC Universal. Seriously?

Being a tech entrepreneur I was skeptical of this result. I am a long-time reader of famous tech reporters — Farhad Manjoo, Casey Newton, Kara Swisher etc. How could Jasmin beat them?

How OwlFactor rates reporters

The methodology for our ratings is based on guidelines from the International Federation for Library Associations, details of which are in this blog post.

The short version is that our ratings model weights heavily how well-sourced articles are and how opinionated the writing style is. So why is Jasmin scoring better than those famous reporters?

Jasmin vs. the world

Take a look at her articles and you’ll see that they are simple and to the point. Every one of her articles has a diverse set of links to sources and her tone of writing is relatively unopinionated. At a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low, this is exactly what the public wants — just the facts.

Contrast this with the established journalists who tend to write with a more opinionated tone — perhaps because have formed opinions over time that seep into their writing. And their sourcing tends to be modest, perhaps because they feel the points they state are indisputable or have been covered elsewhere. Whatever the case, if you didn’t know who Farhad, Casey, or Kara were, you may not trust their work as much as Jasmin’s.

Is Jasmin an exception or the rule?

Our journalist ratings page shows that oddities like Jasmin scoring higher than other famous tech reporters is not the exception but rather the rule. Look at any publisher or category and the people ranking highest are not necessarily famous reporters.

An even more striking finding is that overall the top 5 reporters are women. Given that women make up less than one-third of newsrooms this is shocking.

Could it be that women feel pressure to better source their work than their male counterparts?

Look closer and the story is even more interesting. The third-highest rated reporter overall is P.R. Lockhart at Vox. She’s African-American, just like Jasmin. With black women representing just 2.5% of the journalism workforce, P.R.’s score and Jasmin’s score are nothing short of brilliant and may suggest that minorities work incredibly hard in their field of work.

In God we trust. All else bring data

The above quote comes from statistician W. Edward Demming and is famous in geeky circles. But it applies equally well to journalism. As The American Press Institute says:

Journalism is a discipline of verification

As a society, we are well served by journalists whose default mode is skepticism. Similarly, as consumers of news, our default mode should be skepticism. If the article you’re reading doesn’t have credible, verifiable sources it isn’t worth much.

But evaluating the quality of sources in an article manually can be cumbersome, particularly given the torrent of information on social media. Hence, OwlFactor’s free tools make this easier. In the process, OwlFactor also elevates the work of lesser-known but excellent journalists so that you can feel confident you’re reading high-quality news.

Update 12/5/18: Since OwlFactor’s rankings are live they are continuously updated and Jasmin Boyce is no longer the top-ranked tech. reporter. That honor goes to Lauren Johnson of Business Insider who scored 82.8 vs. Jasmin’s 76.8 . Worth noting that women make up 50% of top 10 tech reporters.