Ranking The Rake’s Rankings
The Rake’s farewell print issue (March 2008) includes a sidebar survey listing where local people say they get their news. Here’s how they ranked things:
StarTribune
Pioneer Press
The Rake
Minnesota Monitor
Daily Planet
City Pages
MinnPost
Cursor
MNSpeak
The Daily Mole
Politics in Minnesota
Talking Points Memo
Gizmodo
Informed Comment
Blogumentary
Eyeteeth
Walker Blogs
Mediation
Downtown Journal
WCCO
Southwest Journal
Minnesota Lawyer
MN Blue
The Sky Blue Waters Report
However, if you run that list through the Technorati search engine and sort by how often each site is mentioned in blogs, you’ll get a different ranking.
But before getting into that, it’s worth mentioning that a few of the sites on the list are nationally focused sites rather than local, such as the popular tech blog, Gizmodo, or the national political news site, Talking Points Memo. Strangely, the locally produced, nationally focused right-wing blog, Powerline, is missing from the list, which may say something about who was informally polled.
I took the above list (along with a couple sites I’ve involved with: The Deets and Technology Evangelist), ran each site through Technorati (just type the site’s URL into the search box) and made note of the blog reaction count. Here is how the above sites break down using that measure:
News Sites Mentions
315462 Gizmodo 144322 StarTribune 61249 WCCO 43608 Talking Points Memo 16098 Pioneer Press 13641 Informed Comment 5850 The Rake 4303 City Pages 3427 Minnesota Monitor 2569 Technology Evangelist 1642 Cursor 1594 MNSpeak 1307 MinnPost 1023 Walker Blogs 946 Daily Planet 673 Eyeteeth 571 Blogumentary 379 The Deets 365 MN Blue 310 The Sky Blue Waters Report 287 The Daily Mole 268 Mediation 181 Downtown Journal 179 Minnesota Lawyer 164 Politics in Minnesota 7 Southwest Journal
It’s interesting to see how things sort out. First, I’d drop Gizmodo, Informed Comment, Talking Points Memo, and Technology Evangelist from the list since they’re not local sites.
Looking at what’s left: It’s amazing that a TV station beats a major daily newspaper site (WCCO over the Pioneer Press). I’m not sure if that’s a statement about how little news the PP creates, how inaccessible their website is, both, or something else.
MNspeak’s page views to employee ratio has to be among the highest in Minnesota.
Eyeteeth, Blogumentary, and The Deets, receive between 1/2 to 1/4 as many mentions as Minnpost with 1/50th as many writers. Another 300+ blog mention local site run by one person is SkinnySki.com.
I’m trying to understand why Southwest Journal came out so low. My best guess is because they truncate their feeds, causing a lot of local influential bloggers to avoid reading that site.
I’m sure plenty of other local sites are missing from this list. The rest of our local mainstream media sites, Metblogs, and The Bridge come to mind. Let us know where other sites stand in the comments.
February 25th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Come on! Where’s the Villager? I mean, the Villager supplies some of the most accurate and balanced journalism in the Twin Cities!
I read the Villager the moment I get home and pull it from the evergreen in my front yard. Oh those Villager delivery people! I look forward to my weekly copy of the Villager.
Villager, Villager, Villager.
There, the Villager has been mentioned nine times compared to the Southwest Journal’s seven times. Suck it Southwest Journal!
Oh crap, I just mentioned the SW Journal twice. Villager Villager.
February 25th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
WCCO has RSS feeds like crazy, while the Pi Press has only one RSS feed as far as I can tell. I think it’s that simple. In fact, MNSpeak links a lot of AP stories which were reprinted on WCCO’s website, which were originally Strib stories. So the WCCO RSS feeds must be pretty useful to people.
February 25th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Freets, The Villager is great, but the only thing they have online is the front page of their June 4, 1953 edition which now has at least one citation.
Jason, that’s a good point about the recycling of locally produce, AP reproduced stories. I know that I look for a permanently linkable version of stories, so while the Pioneer Press or Star Tribune may be the original source of the story, I may choose to link to the same story somewhere else in order to provide a better experience for my readers.
The Pi Press has a lot of feeds if you include the mess of loosely affiliated blogs.
February 25th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
I’m shocked at how high Cursor ranks on both lists — it looks only slightly better than a geocities site and just is a bunch of local msm links. Who’s going to that to get info and haven’t they seen the last three years of web developments?
February 26th, 2008 at 6:56 am
Jason is being modest. I wouldn’t visit WCCO.com as often if he wasn’t there. I cite the DeRusha Factor.
Lot of folks in the “community” have followed J home to WCCO.com
February 26th, 2008 at 7:32 am
Oh Ed, you and your fancy “RSS feeds.” Whatever! Just take a look below at what you get when you click on the “Classified Ads” page of the Villager.
To place a classified ad, follow these simple steps:
1. Compose your ad
2. Choose the category under which you’d like the ad to run
3. Decide which issues you’d like to advertise in
4. E-mail, fax or deliver the ad to our offices along with your phone number
5. Wait for a phone call from us to discuss composition, pricing and run dates.
See Ed! E-mailing, faxing, or delivering your ad in person THEN waiting for a phone call from the Villager. Let’s see your RSS feeds do THAT!
Along with the SWJournal, suck it The Deets! Villager Villager.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:15 am
You’ll notice, if you look a little closer that these are not rankings at all. The rankings are on a different sidebar altogether. The list to which you are referring is in fact just a list of sites compiled by asking the article’s various subjects what local online news sources they use. That’s ALL.
February 26th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Thanks for the compliments about the Villager. I’m sure the other contributing writers will appreciate them as well.
I will make sure the publisher and editors see this.
February 26th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
By the way, that AP thing of them rewriting Strib stories and WCCO — or MPR or any other metro-area broadcaster putting recycling them on their Web site? Those days are over.
February 27th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Great Jane! Love the Villager, keep up the great work! I know Ed loves it too.
February 28th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Ditto what Cristina said. I don’t think you understand Technorati very well. They’re only measuring response from Technorati-registered blogs. If you really want to crunch this data, you need to do an advanced Google search on each site, omitting their own URLs. Have fun with that project.
Btw, by your criteria, Norwegianity outranks Cursor, yet Cursor has 20x my traffic. And for those who don’t “get” Cursor, well, I guess you had to be there when they started and nothing else was out there.
February 28th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
More specifically, Technorati is measuring Technorati pinged (but not necessarily registered) blogs.
And yes, that’s not necessarily a measure of traffic or influence as you point out.
February 28th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
More to the point, I should have said I don’t think The Rake understood those things.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:41 am
I think the context of The Rake’s online list had a slightly different meaning than the print version based on how it was presented based on what I gathered from Christina’s comments on MNSpeak.