By: E&P Staff In its sixth annual Reader Report Card, the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago averaged a grade of B on 13 measures of credibility, but more readers are also awarding D's and F's, the newspaper says.
"While our B is still respectable -- at 3.8 on a 5.0 scale, it is the lowest we've received on the survey since the first year," Jim Slusher, assistant managing editor, wrote in an editorial page letter to readers. "Typically, the overall rating has hovered just below to right around 4.0."
Readers like the "design" and "usefulness" of the Paddock Publications Inc. daily, but aren't so convinced about its "fairness" and "wholeness of story."
While the majority of readers -- 57% -- graded the paper's "fairness" and "wholeness of story" as an A or B, "that's as much as 10 points below the ratings in those categories in recent years," Slusher wrote.
Some 29% of readers graded the paper's "fairness" as a D or F, while 25% gave flunking marks for "wholeness of story.'
"We continue to take comfort that the positive ratings remain high in Usefulness, one of the areas we consider most important, but the 78% rating us A or B is the lowest positive we've received in this category," Slusher wrote in the letter published Thursday.
Nearly 1,700 readers took the time to fill out the report card, and many went further, submitting nearly 200 typewritten pages of comments. The Daily Herald has run the Reader Report Card annually since 2000.
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