erin mccann |Verified account

(sorry, that wapo piece is from 2005, not 2003. whoops!)

What I like about this list is that there's no single way to leapfrog to the top, but there are some common practices: write good things. do the digital hygiene. excel at the left-field idea. know what readers want and serve it up to them.

None of this stuff is rocket science, but you can see, scanning through here, which news organizations are flexing on which one of those levers.

Are the CNN obits for Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade the best written? Dunno, but they're the ones that ranked on here, because CNN's built a structure that makes that happen.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't point out that there's a lot of entries on here that aren't in English, because hey, there's a whole rest of the world out there! smart publishers don't ignore that.

(here's chartbeat, btw, answering a little more about the methodology of the list. Turns out: yes, it is only sites that use chartbeat, which of course means it's not an exhaustive list of all your favorite news sites, but many of them. https://twitter.com/Chartbeat/status/1075163580348153862 …)