Count Grid Chicago as an award-winning site. The Community Media Workshop yesterday released the results of its study called The NEW News 2012: Ranking Chicago’s Online News Scene, funded by The Chicago Community Trust and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The ranking of Specialty News sites follows:

1. catalyst-chicago.org
2. progressillinois.com
3. chicagoreporter.com
4. gridchicago.com
5. activetrans.org
6. capitolfax.com
7. yochicago.com
8. chicagoparent.com
9. district299.com
10. chicagoradioandmedia.com
11. secondcitycop.blogspot.com

For those curious on how this ranking was created, it was a mix of qualitative and quantitative reviews. Read each site’s scores and comments. A press release summarized the methodology:

To get to a list of top ranked sites researchers began with a list of 467 sites that primarily served the City of Chicago (as opposed to a suburban audience), which was then reduced to 191 sites based on how often sites published new content. The complete report ranks a total of 51 online news sites in four other categories: Citywide News, Neighborhood News, Arts, Culture and Entertainment and Aggregators. Sites were assigned a category and scored using the following quantitative measures: Google RSS readers, Compte.com estimates, social media fans, Google page rank and Alexa traffic rank. Reviewers then dug in to the top scoring sites to assign a qualitative score based on the following: news quality, audience engagement, quality of coverage, diversity in coverage and reporting, and quality of multimedia usage.

We revel in this accomplishment!