The Top Publications of 2024

How can we measure journalistic excellence? Beehive News believes in evaluating it at the most granular level: the news article. The results of the ‘top publications of 2024′ ranking below are therefore not based on expert opinion or limited sampling. Instead, they stem from the hundreds of thousands of articles published in the last 12 months and assessed through a comprehensive and rigorous system.

Before diving into the results, here’s a brief overview of who we are, our methodology, and the rigorous criteria that underpin our ratings.

THE PLATFORM

Beehive News aggregates and assesses over 1 thousand daily news articles in real time, from 13 publications in the UK and the world. Through those in-depth assessments, focused on professional rigour and excellence, Beehive News directly promotes high quality journalism and exposes potentially misleading content.

The results represent the averages of over 545 thousand news articles assessed in 2024.

THE METHODOLOGY

Generally speaking, algorithms can be biased when improperly designed. To avoid this, our proprietary technology is carefully planned and coded in such manner that the article’s content (e.g. what the viewpoints are) is less relevant than the article’s approach (e.g. whether it presents opposing viewpoints). This means that two articles with entirely opposing viewpoints can both score very highly, provided they adhere to well-established industry best practices. This also ensures those evaluations are logical – almost mathematical – and free from the influence of potential personal or political biases

THE 2024 RESULTS

The annual ranking is based on scores derived from three core areas: Bias & Fact Base, Context & Completeness, and Quality of Writing. Each of those areas includes a long list of criteria.

Bias & Fact Base ratings are based on whether articles gather evidence from appropriate primary sources, use evidence to build logical reasoning, sufficiently demonstrate causality, present different viewpoints and avoid an emotionally charged tone, for example.
Context & Completeness ratings take into consideration, for example, whether key contextual elements are present, historical or peer comparisons are provided, and nummerical data is contextualised and comparable.
Quality of Writing ratings are based on language use and structure, as well as on the use of overly complex or broadly accessible expressions and terminology.

The results below represent the average scores of news articles published by these publications and assessed by Beehive News using the outlined criteria. They therefore do not reflect the quality of all their work, nor should be used to label all of their work. Individually, each publication has produced articles that scored both very high and very low. The results do, however, indicate the likelihood of these outlets publishing rigorously crafted information, and the probability that any randomly selected article published by them meets high journalistic standards.