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Posted April 4, 2004
An updated rating for year-to-date 2004, as at July 5, is available
in the Members' Area.
Newsknife has introduced a new method of rating news sites. We’re
rating them on relevance.
According to our research, the sites at the top of our relevance
rankings are highly relevant at the moment as credible news sources
that present major news stories promptly.
In other words they’re good news sites currently doing a darn good
job. You'll probably benefit if you visit them instead of other
news sites. (See how
we rate and how we rated previously.)
Newsknife aims to publish a series of useful rankings from our
relevance data. We’re starting with a beauty: the No. 1 performing
news sites. Study this list. Then read what it means and how we
produced it.
1 37 The
New York Times
2 22 Reuters
3 22 The
Washington Post
4 19 ABC
News
5 16 Voice
of America
6 15 San
Francisco Chronicle
To produce our relevance ratings Newsknife visits Google
News often and notes the individual news sites that Google
News links to as sources for its major news items.
The Google News listings for each news item are “sorted by relevance”.
The most relevant news sources are listed first where they’re easy
to see, just like at a standard search engine.
We calculate the order of relevance of each listing and along with
our judgement, it forms a good part of how we produce Newsknife
News Relevance ratings. (See how
we rate.)
Imagine how relevant a news site and it’s version of a particular
news story needs to be in order to be chosen by Google News as their
first listed source for that story.
Above, you’re looking at the news sites that we consider were frequently
that good. The New York Times was listed first as a source by Google
News 37 times in our sample.
Newsknife’s “No. 1 sites” list, from which the above sites were
taken, was produced from our visits to Google News during December
2003 – March 2004. We recorded a maximum of 300 sources for each
of 319 news items. In total we recorded 55332 individual source
site listings by 1424 sites.
Eighty-one of those sites appeared as the No. 1 source for a major
Google News item at least once.
For a modest $US10 you can join Newsknife’s Members’ Area and see
the complete ranked list of 1295 sites and the number of appearances
in first place by each site. To join simply click in the panel on
the left of this page. (See other members’
goodies you’ll get.)
Google News as a barometer
Google is highly successful at determining what web users want.
Newsknife believes Google News is a good barometer of how well a
news site is serving the general public.
If a news site does well in Google News rankings chances are it
will do well outside of Google News. Visit the sites at the top
of our relevance ranking directly with confidence.
The interesting case of Xinhua
The first 12 names in our “No. 1 sites” list are not surprisingly
mostly a Who’s Who of well-known sites. But one name does stand
out, 9th placed Xinhua, China.
We study the main Google News site news.google.com.
That’s likely to be aimed mainly at a US audience. Is Xinhua relevant
to them?
The fact is Xinhua appeared often and well in our sample. Their
news story topics were global. If you visited them as often as Google
News seems to maybe you’d put them on your list of favorites.
Whether you do that or not you’d expect Xinhua to report well on
Asian stories like the bird flu. That's valuable because Newsknife
aims to include timely relevance rankings for hot topics (like Asian
bird flu). Very useful if you want to cut straight to good news
sites for that topic.
To find the current most relevant news sites visit Newsknife regularly.
We rate the news sites.
Newsknife in-depth information tools:
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reserved.
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