Top newspaper sites in minutes spent

For the month of November, here are the top newspaper sites ranked by total (not average) time spent:

    1. NYTimes.com (550,035 minutes)
    2. USAToday.com (136,603)
    3. WashingtonPost.com (145,083)
    4. Boston.com (79,712)
    5. WSJ.com (72,110)

And there are some big surprises with the rest of the list of the top 30. For example, Chron.com (Houston Chronicle) beats LATimes.com handily. So does AZCentral.com. But the debate continues: is total time spent better than unique users when ranking top news sites? Or is it a combination of both? And, of course, there’s the whole issue of accuracy and standardization in metrics, which is the subject of this story today.