Mediagazer Leaderboard brings you the top 100 media news sites

Today we’re launching the Mediagazer Leaderboard – a list of our top 100 source websites, ranked in order. The ranking is based on a variable we call presence – the percentage of headline space a source occupied on Mediagazer over the past 30 days. The greater a site’s presence, the higher they appear on the list.

Since its heralded launch in 2007, the Techmeme Leaderboard has become an essential collection of news thinkers, makers, and leaders. We expect the Mediagazer Leaderboard to follow that example for the media industry. Because our list is dynamic and automatically updated every 20 minutes, you will never find a stale or abandoned site – just sites with current, informative news about the media industry.

A short note about our methodology: Links in “Discussion” do not affect presense, only full headlines. And, to keep things simple, “source” is identified by a publisher’s choice of brand. For instance, Media Decoder is a blog from the New York Times, but, for purposes of the Leaderboard, headlines from “Media Decoder” are counted separately from headlines listed from “New York Times.” For a deeper explanation about the Leaderboard’s purpose, methodology, and whether or not it is biased (short answer: it is!), please see this post from Gabe Rivera about the launch of the Techmeme Leaderboard.

Why are you launching this now? We needed at least 30 days after our March launch to have enough data to calculate. Then we tacked on an extra month because, well, we were busy. As an additional incentive to launch today: I’m leaving tomorrow for New York City to attend Mediabistro Circus and TechCrunch Disrupt, so I’ll be available to answer any questions or dismiss any complaints in person. (Want to meet up? Drop me a line.)

How else can you use this thing? We’ve made it easy to get to our sources. The source URL and RSS feed are hyperlinked on our list, so you can easily check out any of the sites. Curious as to what kind of stories have become Mediagazer headlines? You can access each sources’ headlines by clicking the “Archive” link next to the source name. It will return each Mediagazer headline from that particular source. If you’d like to track the history of the Leaderboard, you can access previous lists by entering the date on the right side of the page. We also have an OPML file available, allowing you to access and play with all this Leaderboard data.

So, what’s the point? Mediagazer is designed to showcase the top media news of the day. We think that revealing our top sources, and just how important they are to us, will help our audience better understand the greater media landscape. While we suspect that the release of the Leaderboard will further inflate egos and perhaps settle a small bet or two, we hope you can use the Mediagazer Leaderboard to discover just how strong some of the media voices around you are.