VOA’s Internet Site Scores High in User Satisfaction

Washington, D.C., May 27, 2005 – VOANews.com, the Voice of America’s (VOA) Internet site, ranks as high in user satisfaction as those of several leading U.S. news organizations, according to a survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Survey (ACSI).

ACSI’s baseline score for VOANews.com was 73 for mid-March through April 24. That ranks favorably compared to ABCNews.com (74), MSNBC.com (74), CNN.com (74), USAToday.com (72), and NYTimes.com (72) for the last quarter of 2004.

The ACSI survey, which was developed at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Michigan, is widely accepted as one of the best third party measurement tools of customer satisfaction. It measures users’ evaluations of content, functionality, image, look and feel, navigation, news content, search function, and site performance.

“We’ve been adding a lot of innovative options to our Internet presence, so it’s great to see how much our users appreciate it,” said VOA Director David Jackson. He noted that VOA has recently added RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to its site to enable users to select specific categories of news they can have fed directly into their browser’s RSS reader. VOA has also just launched a new Podcasts page that makes VOA programs available in MP3 format.

Respondents to the survey accessed VOA’s site from countries including Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Belarus, Bhutan, China, Ghana, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Kuwait, Macedonia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, and Vietnam.

More information about VOA’s RSS service can be found at http://www.voanews.com/english/rss.cfm and information on the new “Podcasts” service is available at www.voanews.com/english/podcasts.cfm.

The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. VOA broadcasts more than 1,000 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of more than 100 million people. Programs are produced in 44 languages, including English.

For more information, call the Office of Public Affairs at (202) 401-7000, or E-Mail [email protected].