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:
- catalyst-chicago.org
- progressillinois.com
- chicagoreporter.com
- gridchicago.com
- activetrans.org
- capitolfax.com
- yochicago.com
- chicagoparent.com
- district299.com
- chicagoradioandmedia.com
- 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!
Congrats!