The Top News Outlets for May 2008

Just saw this list of the most popular online news sources from Nielsen Online.

Brand or Channel — May ’08 Unique Audience (000) — May ’07 Unique Audience (000)

Yahoo! News — 35,846 — 30,451
MSNBC Digital Network — 35,184 — 28,347
CNN Digital Network — 33,101 — 29,094
AOL News — 22,524 — 17,444
NYTimes.com — 21,340 — 12,775

Tribune Newspapers — 16,238 — 13,300
Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division — 14,629 — 12,645
Google News — 11,356 — 9,359
ABCNEWS Digital Network — 11,124 — 10,211
USATODAY.com — 10,785 — 9,528

Fox News Digital Network — 10,132 — 7,594
CBS News Digital Network — 9,225 — 8,620
washingtonpost.com — 9,204 — 8,613
McClatchy Newspaper Network — 9,131 — 9,885
Hearst Newspapers Digital — 7,955 — 8,380

WorldNow — 7,523 — 6,232
MediaNews Group Newspapers — 6,965 — 6,189
Slate — 6,456 — 3,856
Advance Internet — 6,202 — 6,006
IB Websites — 5,943 — 5,203

BBC News — 5,933 — 6,554
Cox Newspapers — 5,826 — 3,949
Belo Television — 5,354 — 3,301
Topix — 5,133 — 4,411
Boston.com — 4,962 — 4,038

Gannett Broadcasting — 4,735 — 3,030
TheHuffingtonPost.com — 4,715 — 1,327
Associated Press — 4,527 — 8,191
Belo Newspapers — 4,462 — 2,417
Fox Television Stations — 4,386 — 3,451

I’m happy to see so many newspaper companies are cracking the list. The audience is there; we just need to use that more effectively to make money and keep things going. It’s also good that the big news sites like Yahoo!, AOL and MSN beat out Google News by so much: the first three still have a human element at play in editing, proving that context really does matter.

So good news to all you editors: for now, you still can’t be replaced by robots.