The list of news sources we used for Split Screen.
You can read our methodology for Split Screen here. Our methodology for the overall Citizen Browser project is described in "How We Built a Facebook Inspector."
For our Citizen Browser project Split Screen, we highlighted the news sources that appeared on our panelists’ Facebook feeds.
To decide what urls should be considered news, we needed a list of news domain names to match against. There isn’t one authoritative source for such a list, and it is constantly changing. Even the definition of “news” is subjective and open to interpretation based on the context in which it is being used.
Our list was compiled from several sources. Facebook’s analytics firm CrowdTangle curates a wide variety of news source lists, and we used several of these to create a master list including:
- “All Media”
- “Black Press”
- “Local Media - Broadcast”
- “Local Media - Newspapers & Digital Sites”
- “Local Media (Full List)”
- “US Science & Tech pubs”
- “US Family & Relationship Pubs”
- “US Entertainment Media”
- “US Lifestyle Pubs”
- “US Food Publishers”
- “US Latinx Media”
- “US Music Media”
- “US Sports Media”
- “US Wellness Pubs”
- “US Home & Living Pubs”
- “US Consumer/Shopping Pubs”
- “US Special Interest Pubs”
- “US Style Publications”
- “US Travel & Adventure Pubs”
- “US Beauty Publishers”
- ”US College Newspapers”
- “US General Media”
- “US Top Newspapers”
- “US Political Media”
These source lists were compiled on Feb. 18, 2021.
We then included a large list of sources from “Local News Dataset 2018” from The Markup’s Leon Yin.
From this broad list, we sought to filter our list to sharpen the focus on what what we termed “hard news.”
We considered “hard news” to include:
- National, international and local news
- Breaking news
- Science and technology
- Business
- Politics and political opinion
We excluded sources we determined to be “soft news”:
- Entertainment: music, TV, movies
- Celebrity news
- Gossip
- Sports
- Astrology
- Recipes and cooking
- Fashion and style
- Lifestyle
- Religion
- Travel
- Special interests (cars, golf, guns, scuba diving etc)
- Comedy
We also excluded government entities and specialized trade publications that did not cover general news.
After filtering out these categories, we ended up with just under 7,000 news sources.
We made no effort to make any ideological classification for any source. We wanted content that was written and posted by journalists for regular readers all over the world.
Due to the large dataset, and the turbulent news industry, this should be viewed as a snapshot in time of news sources for March 2021. We made our best attempt to remove broken and incorrect links.
The process of deciding what is “hard” and “soft” news is subjective, and imprecise.
We are sharing our final list of filtered “hard news” sources.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| source | The name of the news source. |
| url_domain | The URL of the news source. |
split_screen_news_sources.csv 228 KB. 6,989 rows. First row is the header.
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