A screengrab of today’s www.azcentral.com.
The website for the Arizona Republic, azcentral.com, was given a B+ yesterday for its design and readability by 24/7 Wall Street, a financial blog that rated the nation’s 25 largest newspaper websites for the second year in a row. The grade is up slightly from the B- that the same critic, Douglas A. McIntyre, gave it last year with no real explanation why. The Republic’s website has kept the same design the whole time.
McIntyre gave the site a generally good review all around, with only one downside that may have cost azcentral.com an A grade: “Advertising from local premium marketers seems strong,” he wrote, “but text ads include miracle weight loss treatments and teeth whitening products, a sign that the online version of the paper may not be doing so well financially.”
The Republic’s is the eighth-most-read newspaper website in the U.S.