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Posted July 6, 2005.
Newsknife rates news sites on relevance (how),
based on our analysis of the main Google
News site.
Poverty in Africa is in the news right now. The G8 meeting in
Scotland of the heads of eight major nations, and the accompanying
Live 8 concerts have made sure of that.
Newsknife has produced two lists of highly relevant news sites
for you to visit for news about Africa and by Africans.
First is our ranked list of the most relevant news sites for news
items on Africa over the last year. The Top 12 are shown below.
You can see all 143 sites with their appearance statistics in the
Newsknife Members' Area.
Our other list is 41 highly relevant Africa-based news sites from
Angola through to Zimbabwe. Five are listed further down this page.
The rest are in the Members' Area.
Here are the Top 12 from our ranked list. The figures are explained
below.
1 Voice
of America
2 3 2 4 1 2 3 53
2 AllAfrica.com, Africa
1 1 1 0 0 1 3 71
3 Reuters
AlertNet
1 2 2 2 1 2 0 57
4 Reuters
5 Xinhua
6 BBC
News, UK
7 Guardian
Unlimited, UK
8 Reuters, UK
9 ABC
News
10 ABC Online,
Australia
11 swissinfo, Switzerland
12 Channel
News Asia, Singapore
Another African site almost made this list.
Sudan
Tribune, Sudan
Two observations occurred to us when analyzing the data. Newsknife
has monitored a lot of news items at Google News over the last year.
We were surprised how hard it was to find any volume of major items
about Africa. Perhaps Africa doesn't have the power to force the
world to pay attention.
Secondly, although we monitor the main Google News site, which
is likely targeted mainly at US visitors, we found in our three
recent international news rankings: the
papal succession, Putin
and Russia, and now Africa, that many of the most-relevant
sites are non-US. This might be a hint for your future viewing.
(Voice of America at the top of our Africa list is interesting though.)
How we produced this ranking
Newsknife's ranked list of 143 news sites was produced from 6142
individual site listings at Google News for 31 major news items
about Africa over the last year.
Google News usually lists seven news sites per major news item
on their home page and thirty sites on each sub-page, all "sorted
by relevance".
We awarded each site points per appearance on the home page and
first sub-page, on a sliding scale from first to thirty-seventh
position. With a bit of tweaking we totaled the points to get the
ranking positions shown above.
You can see how many times we found the top three sites on the
Google News home page in positions 1-7 plus each site's total appearances
on the first sub-page.
For instance, we found Voice Of America listed twice as the top
ranked site for a news story on Africa, three times as 2nd ranked,
twice as 3rd, four times as 4th, once as 5th, twice as 6th, 3 times
as 7th, and 53 times on the first sub-page.
African news sites
News about Africa is only half the picture. News by the African
media must surely increase your understanding. The list of 41 African
news sites that Newsknife has found at Google News is a valuable
resource for you. It is in our Members'
Area. Here is a sample.
AngolaPress, Angola
Mmegi, Botswana
Independent Online, South Africa
Sudan Tribune, Sudan
Zimbabwe Mirror, Zimbabwe
The news items we sampled
The 31 news items that Newsknife sampled from Google News for this
relevance ranking covered diverse news including...
- War-torn Sudan
- Togo adjusts the constitution to allow the leader's son to rule
- Foreigners flee Ivory Coast unrest
- The Zimbabwe elections
- Massacred Congolese refugees
- Burundi massacre
- The G8 conference
Right now you can see our full list of top ranked news sites covering
Africa and the list of African news sites if you click at left to
join Newsknife’s Members'
Area.
The $US10 3-month Newsknife membership also lets you see for each
news site, in amazing detail, Newsknife's overall relevance rankings
for the year to date.
Visit Newsknife regularly. We rate the news sites.
Newsknife in-depth information tools:
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