Congrats, You Can Read the New York Times

Midterm Project by Rupa & Bobby.

This project started with a curiosity stemming from the standardized English Language Arts tests taken by all elementary school children in the NYCity public school system. When I was in 3rd grade, the highest percentile of test takers were told that they had a level of reading comprehension that enabled them to read the NYTimes. This experience led to questions:

1. how is reading level measured
2. are nytimes articles truly challenging
3. how does the NYTimes compare to other news publications with comparatively lower reputations
4. how might such a  comparison be visualized

Research indicated that many methods to calculate reading level exist and that most rely upon counting syllables (due to the complexity of polysyllabic words).  Our tests showed that the NYTimes is consistently more difficult to read than Newsday, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.