Consumer Reports' new competition: U.S. News & World Report

Richard Perez-Pena of The New York Times writes Monday about how U.S. News & World Report wants to compete with Consumer Reports in providing consumers rankings about products and services.

Perez-Pena wrote, “The first step in that strategy went public Friday on a magazine Web site (usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks) and today on newsstands — rankings, reviews and information on nearly every model of car, truck, minivan or sport utility vehicle available on the American market.

“In the 1980s, U.S. News discovered a popular audience for authoritative-sounding statistical rankings, beginning with the annual report on colleges that is widely second-guessed — and even more widely read. It later did the same thing with hospitals, graduate schools, high schools and even places to retire.

“The magazine wants to extend that practice to mostly high-end goods, starting with the automotive rankings, followed over the next few years by detailed rankings of things like video cameras, television sets and digital music players. This is less about selling particular issues of the magazine than about driving traffic year-round to Web sites with vastly more material on those products than will fit on printed pages.”

Read more here.