At a media “summit” no less, the Reader‘s website was identified Thursday as pretty darned good.
The occasion was the 2012 Chicago Community Information Summit of the Chicago Community Trust. The discussion focused on two new studies the CCT had commissioned:“The New News” by the Chicago Media Workshop “ranking Chicago’s online news scene,” and “Linking Audiences to News II” by Medill’s Rich Gordon and Syndio Social’s Zachary Johnson, examining Chicago’s “new news ecosystem”—the ever-more-complex interlinking of news sites.
I’m cutting to the chase. CMW ranked the sites in various ways—for specialty news, hyperlocal news, arts and entertainment news, and for aggregated (as in, “we don’t report but we connect you to people who do”) news. But the best-in-show category would have to be “city-wide news sites,” and here the Reader finishes a close second to the Tribune.