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I'm not sure who put this list together- it was an article forwarded to me in the body of an email. Here is a blurb from it explaining what went into the rankings:
"The sites got ratings of “A” through “F” based on: 1) strength of content, 2) ease of use and navigation, 3) use of new web technology including comments sections, message boards, and multimedia, 4) lay-out 5) presence of a strong set of current advertisers, and 6) the size of their audiences based on measurements from the Compete website visitor database for April.
The most important conclusion from this review of online newspaper sites is how uneven the quality is from property to property. Some of the smaller papers which probably have modest resources have done an extremely good job of engaging readers, using the best tools of the internet, and putting up content which adds to the experience of the subscriber to the physical newspaper. Some of these sites are likely to draw multiple visits from the same person throughout the day, the Holy Grail of online content behavior. Other sites seem to be designed to keep readers away. There is clearly not much benchmarking going on in the online part of the newspaper industry, and with the increasing risk that more newspapers will fail,not using a standardized measurement of excellence for improvement is a real shame.
The Wall Street Journal and USA Today rank among the top 25 newspapers, but they are not included here because they are national properties and have access to corporate budgets which may not be available to most of the websites reviewed. It is safe to say that WSJ.com is as good if not better than any other online paper. It has invested huge sums, successfully, in interactive features, the use of blogs, reader response tools and multimedia features from video to charting. It is not, however, a general daily paper. It is a financial publication. News Corp, which owns that paper, is out to change that to some extent, but the metamorphosis is in its early stages."
"The sites got ratings of “A” through “F” based on: 1) strength of content, 2) ease of use and navigation, 3) use of new web technology including comments sections, message boards, and multimedia, 4) lay-out 5) presence of a strong set of current advertisers, and 6) the size of their audiences based on measurements from the Compete website visitor database for April.
The most important conclusion from this review of online newspaper sites is how uneven the quality is from property to property. Some of the smaller papers which probably have modest resources have done an extremely good job of engaging readers, using the best tools of the internet, and putting up content which adds to the experience of the subscriber to the physical newspaper. Some of these sites are likely to draw multiple visits from the same person throughout the day, the Holy Grail of online content behavior. Other sites seem to be designed to keep readers away. There is clearly not much benchmarking going on in the online part of the newspaper industry, and with the increasing risk that more newspapers will fail,not using a standardized measurement of excellence for improvement is a real shame.
The Wall Street Journal and USA Today rank among the top 25 newspapers, but they are not included here because they are national properties and have access to corporate budgets which may not be available to most of the websites reviewed. It is safe to say that WSJ.com is as good if not better than any other online paper. It has invested huge sums, successfully, in interactive features, the use of blogs, reader response tools and multimedia features from video to charting. It is not, however, a general daily paper. It is a financial publication. News Corp, which owns that paper, is out to change that to some extent, but the metamorphosis is in its early stages."
I'm not sure who put this list together- it was an article forwarded to me in the body of an email. Here is a blurb from it explaining what went into the ra... more
UNRANKED
CURRENT SCORE
less stats more stats3.18
Rank
(best ever)
15
Score
(all time)
2590.00
Created
06/05/08
Views 2532
Votes [disabled]
1
The New York Times
(Average daily circulation 1,007,256) (Compete online audience: 12,188,886) NYTimes.com is the single best daily newspaper site in the country. NYTimes.com not only carries a significant amount of content from the print paper's news hole, it also has many features built just for the online version. These include state-of-the art slide shows, charting, and an immense amount of video content. NYTimes.com is also full of areas where readers can respond with comments or in polls. Many of the paper's best writers contribute blogs which is a way to keep readers coming back to the site throughout the day. A number of the sites 24/7 reviewed took their print edition's content when it was produced in the morning and posted only that. Very little if anything was updated later. Across the entire NYTimes.com site, stories are updated hundreds of times a day. Breaking news is often reported by the paper's own staff and, unlike most other online sites, NYTimes.com uses news sources like the AP as a supplement and usually not as a primary source of content. A great deal of the depth and richness of the site is due to the resources of the print paper. This cannot be matched by any other property. But, that can in no way be viewed as a negative. An advantage is an advantage, no matter how it is gained. NYTimes.com has an abundance of national and local advertising. The great breadth of its content makes it, in many ways, better than the print edition from which it was created. NYTimes.com does a good job of supplementing its own content with articles and outside blogs from around the internet. The site uses the company Blogrunner for this, and it is very effective. If readers want to make a small investment in a highly useful digital technology that brings the look and some of the feel of the print paper to the PC, the Times Reader is the most advanced product of its kind. Grade: A
2
The Los Angeles Times
(Average daily circulation: 773,884) (Compete online audience: 3,917,054) The Latimes.com is part of the largest newspaper on the West Coast, owned by the beleaguered Tribune Company. The website is relatively primitive compared to many of the others run by large papers. Navigation, which runs down the left hand side of the pages, is clumsy. The site has a moderately complete video news section. Most of the major stories have a video component. The featured articles on the site play from the strengths of the best reporters from the newspaper. The blogs at the site can be accessed from the homepage, but a visit to the blog section gives the reader a long list of unrelated content. It would be much better if this content was featured more prominently within the relevant sections of the site. As the reader would expect from LA's paper, the entertainment section is complete and well designed. Unlike many metro paper news sites, LATimes.com does an excellent job of presenting local news instead of feeding the reader items that he can find on TV or other online news sites. Grade: B
3
The New York Daily News
(Average daily circulation: 703,137) (Compete online audience: 1,729,407) The size of the NYDailynews.com web audience is only a little more than two times its paid print circulation. That is a smaller ratio than with other large papers. This may be due to the fact that much of the NY Daily News readership is blue collar. It will certainly make it harder for the company to offset falling print revenue with online sales. NYDailynews.com is clean and easy to read. The navigation is excellent. The editors made a good decision to run the major headlines for each section (e.g. travel, entertainment, sports) off the homepages. This allows the reader to see the most important content on a single page. It is not a surprise that gossip and entertainment headlines are near the top of the front page and this plays to the paper's strength. A review of the major sections demonstrates that the web designers have carried the format of presenting the most important headlines on a subject with a brief summary to each section's homepage. This is an extremely helpful roadmap for the reader. Because the paper is read mostly for local content, the site has given that special attention. The paper has a "your neighborhood" search feature to show recent home sales, crime rates, and nearby establishments. Advertising in the paper is modest. Much of it looks like it is sold by national advertising networks, which means the yield-per-page is probably low. The site's multimedia and interactive features are very, very modest. Grade: B-
4
The New York Post
(Average daily circulation: 702,488) (Compete online audience: 1,899,003) NYPost.com is too close to simply being a copy of the daily paper scanned and put online. Since the property is owned by News Corp. which has a large internet business and also WSJ.com, it is disappointing that almost none of this expertise has been applied to the daily paper. The website's video and picture sections look like an afterthought. The best navigation bar for finding site content is at the very bottom of the homepage and is hard to locate. Although NYPost.com has a very good business section, the website uses the strenghts of the print edition: gossip and sports. The local news coverage is particularly weak, a surprise for a paper in the nation's largest city, a metropolitan area with an especially wide diversity of neighborhoods, events, and information. There is a lot of very good scoop in the gossip section of the paper, but this section looks like it was designed by a schizophrenic. The gossip section of the paper does contain some clever features like a celebrity star map for tracking the famous, but it is buried deep enough in the section that it is hard to find. The sports section is at least fairly easy to navigate and has its fair share of video. NYPost.com does not do the newspaper any favors. Grade: C
5
The Washinton Post
(Average daily circulation: 673,180) (Compete online: 6,548,678) The figures from the WPO 10-Q indicate that revenue for the company's online business is relatively small and represents only a modest part of the sales for the newspaper group. That is unfortunate. If any company should be right behind The New York Times in internet revenue it is the Post. The front page of Washingtonpost.com is extremely simple. The site does do one notable thing on the homepage. It hosts web discussion forums which are among the best interactive features 24/7 found among news sites. A great deal of the website is devoted to political coverage, as everyone would expect. But, the interactive editorial features here are very modest, which means that the website is not playing to the strengths of the paper. One clever part of Washintonpost.com is that it makes use of widgets to get Post content onto other sites. Washingtonpost.com has its share of blogs and multimedia, but most of the design effort is lackluster and is not set up to make the site "sticky", an overused but accurate description of how sites drive return visitors. Much of Washingtonpost.com needs to be upgraded. The paper has the content to support a much better website. Grade: B-
6
The Chicago Tribune
(Average daily paid circulation: 541,663) (Compete online audience: 1,954,491) Chicagotribune.com is mediocre, especially for a paper the size of the Trib, the flagship of The Tribune Company. Some of the local coverage is quite good, such as it political column, Clout Street. "The Swamp" from the paper's DC bureau is one of the site's strengths. However, the homepage of the site is confusing and overly busy. Figuring out how to get to other sections of the website is difficult because navigation for classifieds runs "above the fold" on most PCs and editorial navigation runs "below the fold." The content of the sports section is good, but it certainly does not take advantage of the video, graphic, and photo resources the best websites use to keep the interest of readers. The local coverage is excellent. Access to local columnists is easy. This should be The Tribune Company's most sucessful site. Grade: D
7
The Houston Chronicle
(Average daily paid circulation 494,131) (Compete online audience: 1,609,496) The online version of the Houston Chronicle is called Chron.com, which is clever because it makes the site address easy to remember. Right up front, the editors put the navigation for Chron.com at the top of the page. Getting where the reader wants to go is never an issue. The lay-out could be a bit more elegant and less "cut and paste". One of the site's strengths is that it puts the reader's involvement in the spotlight with blogs, photos, and stories, with access to these features coming from the middle of the homepage. Headlines for major stories also run on the homepage so that the reader can move into the site not just by section (e.g. business, community news, metro), but by major feature. Too many of the lead stories at the top of the main page come from the AP. Many newspaper sites put AP stories in a separate box so that local reporting gets special treatment giving the reader and the reporter a sense that this is a local paper, not a collection of newswire headlines. Columns and blogs run next to the news stories. This engages the reader and keeps him on the website longer. Chron.com is weak on interactive and multimedia features, which is too bad because the written content is so strong and the site is well-designed. Grade: B+
8
The Arizona Republic
(Average daily paid circulation: 413,332) (Compete online audience: 1,204,890) This is the first newspaper on the list which abandons its name in the website address completely. The site is called azcentral.com. That seems overly confusing, but it has nothing to do with whether the online paper is good or not. The design of the front page is very basic, which is not bad. One of the clever things the editors have done is run the lists of their "picks", the most read stories, the most recent stories, and those with the most comments at the top of the front page. This gives the reader several reasons to go into the website before he has even seen most of the normal headlines. The front page also lists stories by section which helps readers find what they want without confusion. News about the local community is also right on the homepage. Many of the metro newspaper sites 24/7 reviewed seem to have forgotten that most importantly they are local information outlets. People can watch the space shuttle take off on CNN. The inside pages of the paper are clean but a bit visually dull. The editors have not gone out of their way to provide much in terms of interactivity. Multimedia use is also modest. Grade: B-
9
Newsday
(Average daily paid circulation 379,613.) (Compete online audience: 1,543,183) The front page of the Newsday sight is monumentally confusing. Classified navigation is above the normal table of contents. However, Newsday does do something very intelligent right up front. It highlights the local news by county and city and lists the paper's exclusives near the top of the page. Even within sections like business, the local information is given top billing. Newsday.com benefits from using video often. It allows local coverage to become visual, which tends to pull the reader in. Newsday.com pushes its web exclusives hard. The editors know that pointing out what the web offers outside the print newspaper gives visitors a reason to look at special stories which they can't find elsewhere. National and international news are not featured prominently here, which is probably an excellent idea. Grade B+
10
The San Francisco Chronicle
(Average daily paid circulation: 370,245) (Compete online audience: 2,716,654) This site, known as SFGate.com, is one of the best online newspapers in the country. The pages are clean and navigation is intuitive and easy. There is a slide show just below the major headlines called "Inside SFGate" where the editors can highlight their best stories. Bay area news, the paper's local coverage, is in the middle of the homepage. The ease of getting around the site and allowing the reader to find what is interesting continues to each of the major news sections. SFGate has well thoughtout use of interactive features, video, polls, special reports and blogs. RSS feeds are set up by category so readers do not have to receive all of the paper's headlines or even all the headlines from one section when they go to the RSS readers on their PCs or mobile devices. This is how an online paper should be designed from top to bottom. Grade: A
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