Grading newspapers' Web sites

It's common knowledge that newspapers across the country are struggling to keep readers and increase revenue.
And since newspapers' Web sites are key to their future growth, the site 27/7 Wall St decided to grade the sites of the top 25 newspapers.
The sites were judged on strength of content, ease of use and navigation, use of new web technology including comments sections, message boards, and multimedia, lay-out, presence of a strong set of current advertisers, and the size of their audiences.
The sites were then given grades of "A" through "F."
The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle received an A while The Atlanta Journal Constitution and The Detroit Free Press scored an A-. The Chicago Tribune, The Newark Star-Ledger and The Sacramento Bee were all in the D grade range.

"The most important conclusion from this review of online newspaper sites is how uneven the quality is from property to property. Some of the smaller papers which probably have modest resources have done an extremely good job of engaging readers, using the best tools of the internet, and putting up content which adds to the experience of the subscriber to the physical newspaper. Some of these sites are likely to draw multiple visits from the same person throughout the day, the Holy Grail of online content behavior. Other sites seem to be designed to keep readers away. There is clearly not much benchmarking going on in the online part of the newspaper industry, and with the increasing risk that more newspapers will fail,not using a standardized measurement of excellence for improvement is a real shame."

For the full list click here.