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Infographic Shows How Social Media is Being Used as a News Source. 8 news stories that broke on social media. People don’t care about scoops, they care about trust. We have written a number of times about how social media and the “democratization of distribution” has compressed the news cycle to the point where the half-life of a scoop is measured in minutes rather than hours or days.

And judging by a survey of media attitudes that Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has just released, the number of people who care about who reported something first is rapidly diminishing — if it was ever that big to begin with. Instead, what matters most to readers and listeners and viewers is the trustworthiness of the source, whether it’s a TV program or a newspaper.

Trust, as Newmark likes to say, is “the new black.” The survey, which was done by a polling firm in January, came out of Newmark’s new venture Craigconnects, which he has said is an effort to help nonprofit entities of all kinds connect with supporters. It’s dangerous to read too much into any survey, if only because people often tell researchers what they want to hear. The Most Viral News Sites on the Web. While search engine optimization remains essential, ‘social optimization’ is an increasingly important factor for news sites looking to make their stories cut through the noise online. Now News Whip, a startup that tracks socially-shared news stories, has published its list of the 25 most viral news sites. NewsWhip says that it tracks around 60,000 newly published English language news stories every day, from approximately 5,000 sources. Taking its data for November 2011, the Irish startup, which we have previously looked at in depth here, looked at the sites which published the most which received at least 150 tweets or Facebook shares per hour, a rate that NewsWhip described as fast enough spreading to define as ‘viral’.

The Huffington Post comes out on top of the list with 1347 viral stories, followed by the BBC’s UK site with 1088. There was then a significant gap between second and third place, with the UK’s Guardian newspaper publishing 519 viral stories.