An Ofcom survey of regular users ranked Huffington Post lower than Twitter, YouTube and other social media sources as a source of news and understanding about Covid. The majority of readers of newspapers like The Sun and the Daily Mail rated the publications as providing helpful news about Covid-19, compared to less than a third of Huffington Post readers. Guido wonders whether the BBC – who are considering HuffPo’s former editor Jess Brammar for the role of Executive News Editor – will take into account that her own readers didn’t rate the coverage she oversaw very highly. HuffPo users rated their coverage half as positively compared to BBC users when it came to understanding Covid…

According to the Ofcom News Consumption Survey, which was carried out months before Brammar quit and HuffPo closed the newsdesk, just 40% of its regular users deemed HuffPo a good Covid-19 news source. With just 32% of regular HuffPo users considering the online news site helpful at reporting Covid-19 restrictions, making it the lowest ranked online new-source employing journalists – polling even lower than Snapchat (35%), Instagram (35%), and Facebook (36%). Extraordinarily poor ratings when one considers the latter are user-generated news sources rather than a news source editorially driven by paid journalists…