How unoriginal

If the Huffington Post is the future of journalism, then it should be producing a great deal of original reporting with its stable of unpaid writers. Simon Owens at Bloggasm set out to find just how much, so he combed through a single day's work to find any stories that required some form of contact between the writer and a human source:

...if a blogger called a source, emailed a source, sat on a conference call, published a news tip, attended an event in person, or found any information that wasn’t easily available through a Google search, reading another news source, or watching television, I marked it as original reporting.

Owens looked at 77 front-page stories. He found four were links to news on other sites, 13 were wire copy stories, and 55 were opinion and/or summaries of someone else's work (as this post is).

Five stories met the definition of original reporting - that's six percent.