By: E&P Staff The New York Times, Newsday, and the St. Petersburg Times are the newspapers with the best quality Web sites, according to a new review from 24/7 Wall Street.
Douglas McIntyre of 24/7 Wall Street has released a list of the top 25 newspaper Web sites, ranking them on quality in an attempt to benchmark "best practices."
The list is based on the top 25 newspapers ranked by daily circulation according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations' most recent data for the six months ending March 2009. From there, 24/7 grades the papers' sites on a scale of "A" through "F" based on strength of content; ease of use and navigation; use of new technology and online tools, including comments sections, etc.; layout; presence of a strong set of advertisers; and size of audience based on unique visitor data culled by Compete.
The New York Times, Newsday and the St. Pete Times all get an "A" or "A-."
But McIntyre concludes that "the quality of newspaper sites is remarkably uneven from property to property."
Only 15 of the sites on the list made a "B-" or above in the study. Some newspaper Web sites considered online stalwarts scored shockingly low. The Houston Chronicle, for example, scored a "D+" while The Boston Globe got a "D."
The benchmarking study stripped out USA Today and The Wall Street Journal -- both ranked as the No. 1 and No. 2 newspaper by circulation respectively -- because they are national properties with access to large budgets, McIntyre said. (Curiously, the New York Times, which outranks both those sites at least according to Nielsen Online data, is included).
Below it the list of the top 23 newspapers and how they scored. Go
here to see in-depth details about each property:
The New York Times (A)
The Los Angeles Times (B-)
The Washington Post (B-)
The New York Daily News (B+)
New York Post (C)
Chicago Tribune (B)
Houston Chronicle (D+)
The Arizona Republic (B+)
The Denver Post (B)
Newsday (A-)
The Dallas Morning News (D-)
The Star Tribune, Minneapolis (B)
Chicago Sun-Times (B)
San Francisco Chronicle (B-)
The Boston Globe (D)
The Plain Dealer, Cleveland (D+)
Detroit Free-Press (B)
The Philadelphia Inquirer (D-)
The Star-Ledger, Newark (F)
St. Petersburg Times (A-)
The Oregonian, Portland (C-)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (B)
San Diego Union-Tribune (B)
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