In the past I’ve given the Winston-Salem Journal a hard time about their online initiatives and I’ve also compared them unfavorably with the Greensboro News & Record so I feel a need to give them some props when I find something positive about their online work.

Newslink, a compilation of news sites, ranks the Journal is the third highest ranking newspaper website in North Carolina and number 85 in the US.  The News & Record is fourth in the state and 105 in the US. The two highest papers in NC are the Charlotte Observer (#20 in the US) and the Raleigh News & Observer (#43 US).  FYI, the top 5 newspaper sites in the US are:

1. The Washington Post
2. Los Angeles Times
3. The New York Times
4. Miami Herald
5. USA Today

Even though this is not an internet-wide sample I still felt I needed to give the Journal some love. FYI, here’s how Newslink describes their rankings:

Local news sites in the United States
are ranked by the total number of times each is accessed via NewsLink by human
users of NewsLink’s publication lists. Results from the 1,000 most-accessed newspaper,
television station and radio station sites are tabulated weekly, typically on Fridays.
When sites are categorized by type, the listing employs the same listings
criteria as are used in creating NewsLink’s lists.

The ranking makes no attempt to measure the total audience served by any  site —
a number very difficult, if not impossible, to measure with any
certainty. What it does attempt to measure is the market share
currently going to each site from among a diverse audience of web users
who probably are not already habitual users of those sites. In other
words, it is more a measure of current, sponteneous interest and
potential growth among new users than it is an absolute measure of
traffic.

A strong site would doubtlessly have a core of habitual
readers who would simply go directly to the site rather than "find" it
through other links. This list measures how many people seek out sites
that have not already been bookmarked or memorized. This is an
important factor since one-time use of a site has about a 45 percent
market share while habitual site use has only a 13 percent market
share, according to other research.

With about half a million unique individual users monthly
and upwards of a quarter of a million links off our site weekly, the
NewsLink audience whose behavior is tracked by this ranking is composed
largely of non-journalists, including a large number of new-to-the-web
users. The audience does tend to be overly representative of people one
might call "opinion leaders" — politicians, executives, professionals, non-journalism educators, media relations people and the like.