Douglas McIntyre at 24/7 Wall Street has graded 25 different newspaper sites for content, design, technology and traffic. The best grade? NYTimes.com. The worst? SacBee.com with a D-.
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Grading the major newspaper sites
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I’ve always felt the Times was the definitive online news website from a purely design/usability perspective (leaving aside any editorial critiques). Their only major blunder was that whole “Times Select” thing.
Nothing is worse than mlive.com
… except maybe my station’s website. I pity our viewers.
It’s interesting that AJC.com was rated higher than Chron.com.
Having lived in both cities, I have to say that AJC.com is not what I would consider the “future” of online newspaper sites.
Chron.com has always been much easier to navigate and their bloggers seem to have much more interaction with the community.
Funny to see the hometown Bee at the bottom of the list. They’re right, though: Da Bee’s site betrays the organization’s deeper problems with reporting as a professional endeavor.
Many of the local-market newspaper sites are weak because they have decreasing numbers of journalists covering fewer and fewer stories. They instead create online ad space by using reader comments to fill up the pages. And those are often filled with the kind of screaming, hostile diatribes that people looking for meaningful media content avoid.
Can someone explain to me why a newspaper’s (or news media site) web site has to cram EVERYTHING from every section on the site onto the front page? does this really work from a usabilty standpoint?
I am glad that somebody finally agrees with me that the Dallas Morning News website (dallasnews.com) is unorganized. I have hated it ever since they changed it a few years ago. Plus they make you log in to read stories and there is always a pop-up that you have to contend with. Even though I may live in Dallas, I always check in with the Houston Chronicle (chron.com).