This is my rubric for judging journalism websites. I decided to make it after a Twitter rant about how judging journalism websites is terribly subjective.
Recently, while doing some judging for a journalism contest, I was given these guidelines for judging best website:
Entries will be judged on original journalistic content, design, creative use of technology and ease of navigation. Entry can include links to examples such as special online projects, interactives or databases prepared during the contest period.
Given that, here is my base rubric:
- Level of journalism
- Looking for quality journalism (newsworthiness, timeliness, scope of coverage, not click bait, etc.)
- Range: 0 - 20
- Notes: Bad sites with good journalism can make up a lot of ground in this field, since it is, after all, a journalism contest
- Design
- Looking for clean design that's not overwhelming, while still being sophisticated
- Range: 0 - 10
- Use of technology
- Looking for well-used features of CMS and interesting other projects that demonstrate technological sophistication
- Range: 0 - 10
- Notes: Knight Lab widgets are cool and will get you extra points, but custom widgets/databases/etc. will earn you a 10
- Ease of navigation
- Not really sure what this means, I interpret as clean nav and ability to locate your current location on site
- Range: 0 - 10
Now that those boilerplate things are out of the way, I made a few more categories to score on. The categories above had a straight-forward 0 to 10 scale, while the ones below are a bit more fun.
- Responsiveness
- It's 2017, if you don't have a responsive site you probably should not enter a best website contest and I will dock points from you
- Range: -5 - 10
- Notes: Non-responsive sites get a -5, no questions asked, just make sure to check for user-agent responsiveness, not just screen size. Earn extra points for having sophisticated design and multiple breakpoints
- Intrusive advertising
- Taboola, Outbrain, pop-over ads and other intrusive advertising can really kill a decent site, but you can't really gain any additional points for not having intrusive advertising
- Range: -5 - 0
- CMS
- If you have a super basic CMS like WordPress and it's obvious, you get less points than a more heavily customized CMS
- Range 0 - 5
- Developer locality
- This one is kind of tricky. What I really want to say is if you have a corporate parent who developed your website somewhere else, you should get less points than if you have an in-house development team
- Range: 0 - 5
- Notes: You can get low marks here if it's a super basic WordPress site
- Homepage slider
- Just don't, your site will look like it just came out of the box.
- Range: -5 - 0
- Notes: Thankfully these are falling out of style but I still see them around
- Auto play video with sound
- I really struggled with this one. I get the draw of having auto play video, but you don't need sound. I personally think this should warrant an automatic disqualification but then several large corporate sites with otherwise good journalism would be booted from the competition
- Range: -5 - 0