  News media websites are important online resources that have drawn great
attention of text mining researchers. The main aim of this study is to propose
a framework for ranking online news websites from different viewpoints. The
ranking of news websites is useful information, which can benefit many
news-related tasks such as news retrieval and news recommendation. In the
proposed framework, the ranking of news websites is obtained by calculating
three measures introduced in the paper and based on user-generated content.
Each proposed measure is concerned with the performance of news websites from a
particular viewpoint including the completeness of news reports, the diversity
of events being covered by the website and its speed. The use of user-generated
content in this framework, as a partly-unbiased, real-time and low cost content
on the web distinguishes the proposed news website ranking framework from the
literature. The results obtained for three prominent news websites, BBC, CNN,
NYTimes, show that BBC has the best performance in terms of news completeness
and speed, and NYTimes has the best diversity in comparison with the other two
websites.
