Marketing Pilgrim has covered a study from Brodeur and Marketwire on Beat Reporter Views on Social Media, asking reporters to rank blog and social media sites by beat. While the study didn’t have a great number of respondents (they sent out 3,500 invitations and had only 451 reply), there are a few nuggets if you are in PR.

An interesting finding is that while journalist engagement varies by beat, political reporters are the most active and engaged. And while they believe that social media has had a positive impact on the immediacy and diversity of news, they believe it has negatively influenced the quality and accuracy of reporting in their field. Finally, a major takeaway was that over half of reporters said they spent more than an hour per day with online news sources and blogs.

Reporters rank blogs and online news sites:

• In the Technology space
  • Engadget, Gizmodo and Boing Boing were the most popular
  • Arstechnica, GigaOm, and Engadget were the most credible
• In the Travel space
  • Tripadvisor, Frommers, and Yahoo! Travel were the most popular
  • Frommers, Forbes Travele, and Travel Channel were the most credible
• In the Health Care space
  • NIH, WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and MSN Health were the most popular and credible
• In the political space
  • Huffington Post, Real Clear Politics, Talking Points Memo, and Daily Kos were the most popular and credible
• In the lifestyle space
  • TMZ, Perez Hilton, and MSN Lifestyle were the most popular
  • MSN Lifestyle, AOL Living, and TMZ were the most credible