adrian monck

Britain’s Top Ten Journo-Bloggers

Yes, shameless list-porn. Buoyed up by hitting 300 subscribers in Feedburner, and approaching 30,000 unique users I was hit by an attack of vanity (over-compensating for my plummeting Technorati ranking) and decided to try and list the top 10 UK j-blogs. Pride, of course, always comes before a fall.

So, I followed Martin Belam’s Herculean efforts to get the top 100 newspaper RSS feeds via Google Reader. Using a list compiled from weeks of research culled from blogrolls, I thus proudly determined my own top ten of the UK’s finest journalism bloggers:

  1. 194 Roy Greenslade
  2. 165 Paul Bradshaw
  3. 119 Shane Richmond
  4. 73 Robin Hamman
  5. 66 Jemima Kiss
  6. 65 Andrew Grant-Adamson

    7. 65 Martin Stabe

  7. 61 Richard Sambrook
  8. 49 Seamus McCauley
  9. 46 Simon Waldman

Kudos to Paul Bradshaw. Obviously I haven’t included myself, as I don’t have enough subscribers really trust the methodology.

Couple of points, besides all the obvious ones.

Is Seamus too much of a renaissance man to be a journo-blogger? If he’s ruled out Andy Dickinson sneaks in.

If you also strip out the newspapers (Roy, Jemima and Shane), then Suw and Kevin from Strange Attractor, Charlie Beckett and Vickywatch all creep in. And if you finally strip out Vickywatch (because [insert convincing reason here], erm…) then I creep in.

Have I missed anything or anyone out? Except for Martin (77), who would, of course, slot in at number four, although like Seamus he may be too much of a polymath. To burst all our balloons and put it all in to perspective, Mindy McAdams has over 400 Google Reader subscribers.

Adrian Monck

22 responses to “Britain’s Top Ten Journo-Bloggers”

  1. Nice to see myself up there in the list, and I’m very happy to describe myself as not too much of a renaissance man if it means keeping my spot!

    That said, I can see a case being made that while I comment on the news industry I’m not actually a journalist (aside from a brief and amateurish foray into freelancing for some travel websites when I lived in Malaysia back in 1999); and that recent pressures of work have prevented my posting more than a couple of times a week since September, which doesn’t really help the case for the importance of my – alas increasingly empty – blog.

  2. Right then…I better crank up my blogging efforts if I’m going to keep those 46 people happy!

  4. Can you confirm your methodology, Adrian? I’ve run a few Google Reader searches, and can corroborate most of your numbers… but Greenslade’s Guardian blog only seems to have 23 Google subscribers at first glance?

    Cheers
    Simon Dickson
    simondickson.wordpress.com
    (delightedly claiming 68?!)

  6. How about journalist bloggers (rather than journalism bloggers)? Music Thing (edited by me, a journalist) has 1,917 subscribers in Google Reader!

  7. Now Tom, you’re just showing off! Try blogging about journalism and watch those numbers drop!

    But seriously, who would be on your list of top journalists who are bloggers? (Especially interested in people who don’t do it because they’re told to…)

    (I’d quite like to do columnists next, btw)

  8. Moral of the story(?):
    For all that we tend to go on about it, hardly anyone uses RSS. Still.

    Nice list though – actually hadn’t read one or two of them before – cheers.

  9. Journalists who are bloggers? Cutting and pasting from Bloglines…

    1. Chris Anderson (Wired / The Long Tail) (Also Kevin Kelly as Wired
    alumni)
    2. Stephen Dubner (NYT / Freakonomics)
    3. I suppose Mark Frauenfelder is almost as much a journalist as a blogger (Make Magazine / Boing Boing)
    4. Obviously Jeff Jarvis
    5. Ed Gorman (The Times / F1 Blog)

    There are plenty of successful UK journalists blogging (Alphaville? Ben Brogan?) But I don’t read them regularly, so I can’t comment.

    I probably need to justify #5: Ed started a F1 blog at Times Online in March, and he’s been astonishing – 60-100 comments on plenty of posts, 30k visitors a day during the peak of the season, getting about 35% + 35% UK and Spanish readers, teaching me a lot about how blogs can work. He’s having a rest until the new season, but the blog is at http://timesonline.typepad.com/formula_one/
    Plenty of other good Times bloggers (Ruth Gledhill, Charles Bremner, Danny Finkelstein) but Ed has gone from a standing start to huge success very fast.

    Columnists? That will make interesting reading…

  10. group blogs and/or “corporate blogs” maybe don’t count here but a late suggestion for the the BBC Editors blog which has 491 subscribers. (I work for the BBC btw)

    David Hepworth (39) /Andrew Collins (44) to add to your “top” journalist bloggers…

  11. @Jem – it’s hard to filter people out on group blogs. I was interested in individuals. There is a kind of awkward crossover. The editors blog is certainly impressive, but I’d like to see how Peter Barron rates against Peter Horrocks!

    Hepworth and Collins are good calls for journalists doing journalism (rather than writing about doing it). I should have included Rick Waghorn too.

    @Tom – thanks for those. Preliminary look at columnists shows its hard off some sites (Daily Mail – come on down), much easier off others (The Indie)

  13. A very useful List, Adrian. I think Jack Scofield and Seth Finkelstein of The Guardian are not here.
    – Pramit Singh
    MediaVidea

  15. Of course if you use Bloglines stats (a much more discerning readership, I find…) you get a very different story. The fact that it favours me is of course irrelevant…

  16. @Pramit – thanks! I think Jack and Seth veer into the techno but they both address important issues.

    @Paul – if only I could claim my blog on Bloglines!

  17. Lordy – I’d better buck my ideas up.

    But did someone say “no-one really uses RSS”? I can’t live without it. Really – it’s the single most important tool I have.

  18. Jeremy Clarkson only has 84 at last count.

    And I agree – sans NetNewsWire I would be a rat without whiskers.

  19. Paul Bradshaw:
    Jemima would probably be higher if previous RSS feeds were counted.
    Adrian – I haven’t claimed my blog on Bloglines either, but you can still see who subscribes to it.
    PS: I think this raises another issue – there may be RSS readers that are more popular in other countries (in the same way social networks differ globally). Am off to find out…