A look at the availability of the world’s top news websites found only one with a glittering perfect mark over the first half of 2008.

If this were the cupboard where the stars were kept for rewarding keen students, Forbes would be eagerly awaiting a gold one for their infrastructure support folks.

Monitoring service Pingdom found out of thirteen top news sites, only Forbes managed the trek from January 1 to June 30 without a mark against it due to downtime.

After Forbes, seven other news sites managed to keep their availability in the “three nines” range. Doing so meant they managed downtime to a little over four hours or less during the six-month period.

The UK’s Times Online won’t get a gold star for their downtime, worst among the thirteen sites assessed by Pingdom. The Times Online suffered nearly 24 hours of downtime in the first half of the year.

“Millions of people visit these websites every day to read up on current events. If one of them is down, basically any time, day or night, a lot of people are bound to notice,” said Pingdom.

Three other sites experienced double-digit downtime over the course of the first six months, though none were over 15 hours of downtime.