Google's reading age tool - comparing US news sources

Last one of these for now - I've run the Google reading age numbers for the main US news sites too, with the results you see to the left. 

"Main" US news sites in this context are a combination of the Hitwise and Nielssen data as reported in Pew's State of the News Media 2010 report. 

Confirmation of the expected includes business and finance websites using the most challenging language (less basic, more intermediate - almost no major site uses much advanced language according to this schema, except Facebook). By this point I'm not surprised that the aggregators come out using more challenging language than their constituents - I can't yet account for it, but is seems to be consistent across the board.

That the Washington Times and LA Times use almost the same complexity of language as Fox is more of a surprise, but living in England I know Fox only through its abominable reputation. Perhaps American right-wing demagoguery is more articulate than ours.  

More interesting to me is that Drudge, HuffPo and USA Today all sit towards the bottom of the table of challenging language. USA Today, with the simplest language of any major US newspaper site, is of course the highest circulation print newspaper in the states - a distinction enjoyed in the UK by the Sun and News of the World, which happen to use the simplest language here. (People do not choose their newspaper purely on grounds that it is easy to read, but ease does seem to be a consistent marker for mass circulation.) That HuffPo and Drudge, two of the great success stories of online-only news, use relatively accessible language also suggests this is no coincidence. 

Finally Topix, the local news aggregator, is also notable for using more basic language. Which means this exercise probably isn't over and sometime in the coming week I'll be taking a look at how local news sources compare in their complexity of language too. 

You can also see the same data for journalism blogs, tech sites, UK newspapers and social networks.

Notes on methodology: the main www URL typed into Google Advance Search with the "annotate results with reading levels" option turned on. Different results seem to be generated by missing out the www, in some cases. Results are ordered by % of pages classed "intermediate". HT to Searchengineland for the original pointer that the tool exists.