Young Americans: business magazines #1, Wikipedia #2

Which news sources young Americans find most credible might surprise you. Buried on page 14 in the "Edelman Trust Barometer 2008", an annual survey of trust related issues conducted by international PR giant Edelman, is a tiny bombshell that every business magazine publisher needs to see. 

When Americans, ages 24 to 35, were asked "How credible is each source for information about a company?" Business magazines ranked #1, Wikipedia was #2.  

On your next call.

Obviously this is a great study to show if you are selling advertising in a business magazine, but it also documents that trust exists in both traditional and new media. If you are selling an integrated package this study documents that trust can come from a variety of online and offline sources.    

Download the entire Edelman study 

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This is so great! It's full of interesting and knowledgeable content. Thanks for the great blog.

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Wow. This is a wild study. Kind of makes you think twice about click through metrics.

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I Feel this is all about the eternal battle of the new media, being the web, and the old medium, being print. This battle continues right now.

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As a student, I know I use wikipedia for anything that I need to look up real quick.

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I prefer paper journals much more than Wikipedia. And I know why. Because Wikipedia is a biggest source of information, but it's quality below mediocre level.

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that luck for these boys who are born in cradles of gold, which never know what is the scarcity or poverty or at least feel a limitation in his claims, as their father and grandparents were brought into the world with good provision of money accounts, a kind of young.
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[rontowns25]

Fascinating article. I completely agree with the conclusions and would of predicted about the same. Wikipedia causes complications in academic articles or papers. The academic world doesn't view wikipedia as credible. The funny thing is 95% of students find information for papers on wikipedia, but simply don't site the information. Wikipedia is a great source for context.

On a general note, you should take a look at John Assaraf's New Book, "The Answer"... I think you would really enjoy it based off your post topic selections... Thanks for the insightful information. Well stated and very informative. Based off your content selection I’d highly suggest looking at this book… http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2

[Josh Gordon]

Comments from when this was posted on Folio Magazine's website:

Business magazines versus wikipedia
Submitted by Harl Delos on Wed, 07/09/2008 - 03:19.

I suspect business magazines get a much lower score among people that were reading them 25 years ago. When Forbes was published by Malcolm Forbes, and edited by James W. Michaels, it was a brilliant magazine, that demanded similar efforts by other business magazines to not be left in the dust. There's nobody out there, these days, inspiring competition. Similarly, I suspect Wikipedia gets much higher scores from people who aren't very familiar with it. In theory, they don't aspire to truth, but only to repeating what can be found in reliable sources, which would be adequate if you could follow their statements of fact back to the original source to verify them. In practice, much of Wikipedia is controlled by individuals who have too much time on their hands, and too much tinfoil in their hats.
MyWikiBiz tried to help Wikipedia
Submitted by Gregory Kohs on Wed, 07/09/2008 - 11:04.

The company I founded, MyWikiBiz.com, sought to assist both companies of noteworthy status and Wikipedia (lacking articles about such companies) to create freely-licensed content about such companies that was "ready for scraping" into Wikipedia by unpaid, independent editors. Jimmy Wales in fact endorsed this business plan; however, after about 6 weeks of successful operation, I e-mailed a question to Jimmy Wales, asking if the Wikipedia community's recently developed "Conflict of Interest" guideline superceded our agreement. Jimbo's response was to go bat-fruit insane on my Wikipedia account, block it, write a defamatory screed on my User page, and then trash an article I had written about the company Arch Coal. Wales called that article a "PR puff piece" and "a travesty of neutral point of view". Fortunately, the rest of the Wikipedia community saw that the article was just a simple, helpfully descriptive stub of an article about a coal-mining company, and the article was restored. But not before an overzealous administrator plagiarized the original, then introduced his version as "his own work, ab initio". Fifteen months later, that administrator even went so far as to DELETE the original version, so that there would be no evidence of his plagiarism! It is a mixed-up, corrupt, upside-down world at Wikipedia, when it comes to paid editing. They have a Reward Board which pays cash for edits, but when an outside firm tries to duplicate a similar process -- in the bright sunlight of full disclosure -- they're run out of Wikipedia on a rail. Meanwhile, Jimbo makes $100,000 a pop for speaking engagements about Wikipedia. It would seem the primary rule about money and Wikipedia is: "Jimbo is the only one allowed to profit from Wikipedia."
Source of chart?
Submitted by Gregory Kohs on Wed, 07/09/2008 - 13:58.

Josh, where did you obtain that chart, which is isolated on the US data only? I've looked at the Edelman PDF report, and they only show this data in the global aggregate, where Wikipedia ranks 7th -- noticeably lower than in the US.
Link to it
Submitted by Josh Gordom on Thu, 07/10/2008 - 06:52.

Your are correct that Edelman is Global survey, but this chart is clearly a subtabulation. The chart was buried deep in the report. YOu can find it by going to this link: http://www.edelman.com/TRUST/2008/TrustBarometer08_FINAL.pdf Now scroll all the way down to page 14.