US: The Best Blogging Newspapers

Posted by Dominique Lewis Tuohy on March 3, 2006 at 11:40 AM

Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University, has launched a blog with his students called Blue Plate Special. Rosen's team has conducted a survey to find the US's best blogging newspapers amongst the country's top 100 papers by circulation. Their clear winner is The Houston Chronicle, "By a mile."

The Chronicle won because it "does everything well." Specific aspects of the paper's blogging were praised, for example the fact that there is a section entitled "Blogs From Our Readers", the fact that the "writing is fun and clear", and the presence of 'event-specific blogs', such as 'Voices of Katrina'.

The full list of the survey winners reads as follows:

1. The Houston Chronicle

2. The Washington Post

3. USA Today

4. St. Petersburg Times

5. Atlanta Journal-Constitution

6. San Antonio Express News

Honourable mentions go to:

New Orleans Times Picayune

The Oklahoman

When choosing the winners, Rosen and his team were looking for a number of important things: "Ease of use and clear navigation, currency, quality of writing, thinking and linking, voice, comments and reader participation, range and originality, explain what blogging is on your blogs page, show committment!"

Rosen's team is at pains to point out that concentrating on the top 100 papers does inevitably leave out some commendable blogging newspapers. They give the example of The Spokesman Review, which they state most likely would have made their list had they not solely been looking at big dailies. The top 100 US papers range from USA Today at 2.3 million copies a day to Fort Meyers Florida's News-Press at 101, 000 copies daily.

Sources: Blue Plate Special, Poynter Online

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