Joe Think: Tales about relevance, context, storytelling, and local journalism

The Bivings Report ranked the top ten newspaper web sites in the United States. The Denver Post’s site (which I work hard on most every day) came in at number five. Five! Only the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Houston Chronicle ranked higher. Check out what they wrote (I added links to the things they mentioned):

Denver Post: The homepage of this site isn’t much to write home about, but registering with the site automatically gives you your own blog and your own photo gallery for uploading and sharing photos. When you add in some interesting political features, including a voter’s guide and a poll for picking candidates and combine that with alternative content views, internal and external bookmarking features, as well as links from stories to relevant materials, you’ve got all the ingredients necessary to build a great website.

What would be useful here is more information about the number of sites they considered, and the collective experience of the staff (they considered the top 100 largest-circulation papers in the U.S., which prompted some responses). Frankly, the reason this link didn’t go up on the Post’s intranet is probably because nobody besides me had heard of the Bivings Group before (for your information, they’re a DC-based “internet communications firm” that has been in the business since 1993) (it did go up on the intranet, I didn’t see it before I left work for the day).

Not to knock ‘em or anything, they wrote nice stuff and mentioned a lot of the work I’ve been working on. I’ve read the Bivings Group blog for most of the year, and they consistently write intelligent and interesting posts.