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Comment by dwater | Hacker News Reader

For context, U.S. News and World Report used to be a trusted periodical that reported national and international news. In the 80's they started ranking colleges and selling it as a separate publication, which turned out to be pretty profitable, so they repeated the trick by ranking hospitals (1990), cars (2007), and then states (2017). The news business went online only in 2011, then shuttered in 2015. Since then they've just been a rankings company, but they kept the name to trade on their reputation.

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U.S. News and World Report was a highly respected & trusted news magazine in the 70s-90s, but it's online incarnation now is just another clickbait site (similar for Newsweek).

They’re the #1 best rankings company.

According to US News and World Report

They sort of put themselves on the map for college rankings since 1983 but I would hardly say it’s a fair ranking system. For example, they love to tie multiple schools together: 2x 2nd place, 2x 6th place, 4x 9th places, 3x 14th places, 2x 17th places, and so forth.

Here’s a classic case where if you do something long enough, people will trust you.

I remember reading the paper magazine for school in the 1990s. Teachers would assign parts as homework sometimes. It was on that level of trusted journalism

I don't know what the equivalent today would be. The Reuters website maybe?

I had first heard of them because Zork had a US News and Dungeon Report magazine, and it was such a specific name I knew it must refer to something in the real world. I never did get a chance to read the actual magazine, though.

Wow fascinating - so US News is now a rankings company.

If you think of clickbait as a crowdsourced ranking of emotionally manipulative hyperbole, that could be said of any corporate press rag.

US News was a clickbait company before there were clicks to bait.

I feel like it would not be possible to sell such a static and easily leaked thing as a ranking list

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