No one received more top ranking story placements on Google News than the New York Times, which dropped its subscription-based Times Select model earlier this year.
In the US, the Times easily exceeded all other news sources indexed by Google News. The Times represented the top source for given topics 168 times in 2007.
Journalism.co.uk writer Oliver Luft cited Newsknife on the analysis. Newsknife’s ratings came from “our sample of 247,541 individual site listings by 3,809 sites for 1832 news items during 2007.”
Luft noted the number of sources dropped year over year in Google News. In 2006, the sometimes controversial news aggregator run by Google indexed about 4,500 sites.
No other news source broke triple digits in Newsknife’s assessment. The site described its process in determining top source rankings:
Google News usually lists 7 news sites per major news item on their home page and 30 on every sub-page of listings – all “sorted by relevance”.
We study only those categories of stories at Google News that we consider hard news: the Top Two stories, the three top World stories and the three top US stories.
Voice of America, Reuters, The Washington Post, and ABC News rounded out the top five news sources. In 2006, ABC News topped the list, followed closely by the Times, Reuters, the Post, and the Times Online UK.
