As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”

This particular list is sort of a supplement to The Best Tools To Help Develop Global Media Literacy, where I share resources that students and teachers can use to compare and contrast how different current events are handled by media in different countries.

I also plan on developing a similar list of the most popular news slideshows and videos.

Here are some Places To Find The Most Popular News Stories On The Web:

The Newseum has front pages each day from newspapers around the world.

BBC News has a neat Live World Map that shows what news is popular in what part of the world at anytime. Here is a good explanation about how it works.

I’ve known for awhile about the next resource I want to share, but Richard Byrne just wrote about it, and he described it perfectly. So I’m going to quote from his post, and I would encourage you to go there to read his ideas on how to use it with students:

“Ten by Ten is a unique program that links images with news stories. Every hour the top 100 news stories from around the world are linked to images on a ten by ten grid. The stories are ranked.”

Here are direct links to regularly updated pages of major news sites that show their most popular news stories:

USA Today Most Popular Stories

MSNBC Most Popular News Stories

CNN — Most Popular

Yahoo News Most Popular News Stories

New York Times Most Popular Articles

Times Of India Most Read Articles

China Daily Most Popular

The Globe and Mail Most Popular

Wall Street Journal Most Popular

Here are a couple of resources from The Best Tools To Help Develop Global Media Literacy that I’d like to highlight in this post:

One is very new and is called Media Cloud — Visualizations. It’s probably worth reading Read Write Web’s extensive post on the site. In a nutshell, you can identify three media sources from throughout the world and then get a chart for their most frequently used words over the past ninety days or a comparative map showing the depth of coverage of different parts of the world. Both visualizations would be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners, and the discussion potential is rich.

Geographical Media is the newest addition to that list.  After you register (which is a free and easy process) you can see which topics are being covered in the news media in different parts of the world, and compare the differences.  The site seems to have a number of other features — and it’s not particularly intuitive how to navigate through them — but the site has a lot of potential. I’m still exploring.

Suggestions and feedback are, as always, welcome.