Source Matters

Source Matters

Build deeper community relationships with our award-winning source tracking tool

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Why Source Matters

The sources journalists choose to quote in their stories affect and reflect whose stories get told and whose stories get left out of the narrative. They also affect how stories are told, who the news is for and which communities are served — or not served. Source tracking shows you opportunities to make coverage more relevant to your audience, helps you set goals and measures your progress over time — all with the objective of building broader and deeper relationships with your communities.

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Customizable

Choose and adjust the dimensions of diversity to track over time

Source Matters: Customizable

AUTOMATED

Save time and automatically quantify quoted sources

Source Matters: Automated

Impactful

Make long-term culture and workflow changes to better reflect and connect with the communities you serve

Source Matters: Impactful

custom dashboards

Easily access data and insights to help you spot patterns

Source Matters: Custom dashboards

Easy integration

Compatible with any CMS — no scripts installed on your website

Source Matters: Easy integration

Analyze by authors & topics

Identify sourcing gaps and opportunities for a single beat, team or journalist

Source Matters: Analyze by authors and topics

“Source Matters’ value is critical to our newsroom, allowing us to hold ourselves accountable and to humanize our news sources. It helps us learn more about the people we serve, and most importantly see those we are not reaching.”

Colorado Public Radio

“Source Matters has overhauled the source audit process, bringing it into the digital era. The tool offers an array of collection methods and analytics that have helped our newsroom understand more about who we are representing in our coverage.”

VTDigger
INMA Global Media Awards

Source Matters wins Global Media Award

“A much-needed tool to use in the whole news ecosystem. A great solution to a significant issue in news media that adds significant value to the editorial process.”

In June 2022, Source Matters was honored with two awards at the International News Media Association’s (INMA) Global Media Awards.

Source Matters earned a First Place award in the Best New Digital Product category and was awarded Second Place in the Best Internal Data Dashboard and Reports category.

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Newsroom tips: Explaining the why of source tracking

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Build newsroom habits with source tracking

5 ways to support source tracking in your newsroom

Diversify Your Sources

How to audit sources: A guide to help you get started

Frequently asked questions

Source Matters is an award-winning tool that supports automated, customizable, impactful source diversity tracking by any news organization. It is a product of the American Press Institute that can help your news organization better reflect and connect with the communities you serve.

There are a variety of ways you can track the diversity of your sources. The benefit of using a tool like Source Matters includes:

  • Automated source detection: Source Matters employs automation to identify all sources within a newsroom’s stories, eliminating the need for manual entry. This system can extract thousands of sources from thousands of stories in minutes, streamlining the tracking process.
  • Customizable tracking categories: News organizations can define which diversity categories to monitor, such as race, ethnicity, gender, age or other relevant dimensions. This flexibility allows for tailored tracking that aligns with each newsroom’s objectives.
  • Integration and support: Source Matters integrates with any content management system without requiring additional scripts. API also provides training, coaching and resources to assist newsrooms in implementing effective source tracking and fostering cultural change.

Source Matters imports your content through an RSS feed and uses natural language processing algorithms to automatically identify all of your sources from all of your stories. Each newsroom can customize the dimensions of diversity to track their sources. Staff can either manually enter this information or email a survey to their sources asking them to self identify. The system will remember your sources each time they are quoted.

Source Matters is highly customizable and compatible with any news organization and any CMS. We’ve worked with small community newsrooms and major metropolitan ones, as well as corporate chains.

You can read about some of the impacts our newsrooms are having with Source Matters below:

Ideally everyone in the newsroom — from reporters and editors to upper-level managers — as well as those on the business side who need data about audience reach and growth. The dashboards can be filtered to show you what you care about most, whether you’re looking for data at the reporter, team or newsroom level.

The American Press Institute operates Source Matters at a subsidized rate for the news industry. If cost is a barrier for your news organization, we also may have grant-funded subsidies at times to help cover some of the costs. Contact us for pricing information tailored to your organization.

We aren’t able to offer free trials due to the amount of work it takes to set up and customize the application for each news organization. But we do offer demos — contact us to set one up.

Request a demo

Source Matters is now available for local and community organizations of all shapes and sizes. Sign up for updates about upcoming demos. Email questions to the team at support@metricsfornews.com.