News Media Web Quality: Trust, Readability, and Accessibility Across 40,000 News Sites
We analyzed 39,815 news and media websites across SEO, EEAT, WCAG accessibility, and readability grades. Only 1.6% pass SEO. Newspapers lead trust at 62.2% EEAT but fail accessibility at 35.0% WCAG. Sports news has the best SEO (7.0%) and readability (60.7%) but worst accessibility (22.2%). WordPress powers 42% of news sites and outperforms Medium on every quality metric. The platform that publishes the world's information has a quality problem it hasn't solved.