Friday, October 13, 2006

Top 100 Web Newspapers? Cyberjournalist posted a link to this list of "Top 100 U.S. newspaper web sites" at newsknife.com, which bases its ranking on an analysis of Google News search statistics. I wasn't surprised to see The New York Times and The Washington Post on top of the list, but some of the other listings struck me as very strange. For instance, the No. 27 ranking goes to the Brocktown News, a Nevada weekly where the Google Ads outnumber the stories, and No.35 is the Herald News Daily in North Dakota, which surrounds its AP wire stories with nine Google Ads, and apparently only put a handful of its own items online in the past month. Is this a quirk of Google's rankings, or of Newsknife's analysis of those rankings? I don't know, and I don't think it's worth my time and money to find out. After all, it would mean shelling out $10 for a membership in Newsknnife's detailed stats. I don't even want to know how much of a business there is in counseling anxious news companies about getting more hits from the news.google.com search page. What started me wondering about the rankings were a few familiar faces near the bottom of the top-100 list. One was The Norwich Bulletin, where I was the election-night AP pool stringer a few times in the 1970s. (I think it's still the closest daily to the part of Connecticut they call "The quiet corner.") A couple of notches ahead of the Bulletin was The Berkshire Eagle in relatively rural Western Massachusetts, where I spent the first dozen years of my life. The region's larger papers weren't listed, and the cows resting on the home page suggest how hot a news market the Berkshires are, but I guess that's not what Newsknife and Google are measuring. Still, it was strange to see both of those papers ranked five notches above the "Raleigh News," which I assume is Newsknife's name for my former employer, the News & Observer, an Internet pioneer and three-time Pulitzer Prize winning state capital newspaper. (To be fair, the Berkshire Eagle did bring home a Pulitzer of its own for editorial writing, 33 years ago.) The Knoxville News Sentinel, by the way, came in at a (lucky?) 77, beating out bigger papers in a half-dozen state capitals, but not in Nashville -- The Tennessean was No. 67. Between the Tennesee papers were The Hartford Courant, my other old employer, and the "Huffington Post, NY" which I didn't know was a newspaper. Hmm. Come to think of it, the New York Post isn't on the top 100 list at all. Maybe Rupert Murdoch should send Newsknife $10. 2:49:11 PM    comment []

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