Newspapers have been roundly criticized for not moving quickly enough to adapt to the online world.

However, newspapers are finally bringing multimedia to their web sites and are moving aggressively into mobile, according to a new study by the Bivings Group.  

Of the 100 largest U.S. newspaper sites, 92 now have video, up 31 percent from last year. While that is great, 39 percent use video from the AP or local television outlets, meaning that not all newspapers have embraced the move to multimedia enough to hire video staffers.

As far as other features: 97 percent now offer RSS, up from 76 percent last year; 95 percent offer reporter blogs, up from 80 percent last year; 49 percent offer podcasts, up from 31 percent last year. On the downside, only 33 percent allow comments on articles, up from 19 percent last year; and only 51 percent offer the relatively simple to implement list of “most popular” articles on their sites. A depressingly small 5 percent of newspapers--including USA Today, Denver Post and Washington Post--had some form of social networking features. And a nice but still too small 25 percent of newspapers now allow user-generated content such as text, photos, and videos.

Interestingly, papers that require registration to view articles increased slightly to only 29 percent from 23 percent. Such registration information is key for newspapers to do marketing and advertise to users—since they aren’t paying to view articles.

Newspapers are trying to make up for their stumbles on the web by producing content for mobile consumption. 53 percent now produce such content. The figure wasn’t even tracked last year.

(via Newspapers and Technology.)