The University of Maryland’s International Center for Media and the Public Agenda ranked 25 international news websites — from the New York Times to Sky News to Al Jazeera — by openness and accountability in June 2007. The Guardian came first. The BBC was rated poor.
That verdict turned out to rest on a methodological error. The site the researchers assessed was the BBC World Service site, not the BBC News website. The two are not interchangeable: news on the World Service site was scraped from the news website, while BBC News online was a separate operation in a different building with its own journalists, developers and designers, and it was the one that belonged in a ranking of the world’s largest news sites.
Comparing the World Service site with the Guardian or the New York Times was therefore not comparing like with like, and it also meant the study never saw the initiatives that would have counted in its own terms — among them the BBC editors’ blog, an attempt by senior news executives to explain editorial decisions in public. The study’s own website, meanwhile, offered no way to leave feedback. The item reached this post via CJR Daily.