The Internet’s gale-force hype caused quite a bit of anxiety when it first blew through the newsrooms of the region’s dailies a few years ago.

Editors fretted that they would lose their most demographically prized readers to online media that promised instant access to news and information. Debates raged over how to treat breaking news: Would putting your best scoops online ultimately draw people to the print publication – or undermine it?

Today, several years into the Internet age, newspapers have adapted quite smartly to the Webified world by understanding that the adrenaline rush of the day’s hot story may be what drives the scoop hounds in the newsroom, but what a newspaper really sells to its readers, and its advertisers, is a sense of community. And that, it is becoming clear, can be provided electronically and in print.

Thus, the most successful newspaper Web sites have long ago ceded the battle over breaking news to the cnn.coms of the world. They have focused instead on using the most exciting capabilities of the Internet to provide online equivalents to the types of community services that have been the mainstay of newspapers since the printing presses first started rolling: providing notices of local meetings, printing school lunch menus, profiling local politicians, warning commuters of roads under repair, or listing local arts happenings.

Visit the Massachusetts newspaper Web sites and you’ll be treated to live pictures of traffic on the Bourne Bridge, online chats with candidates for town office, and searchable databases of everything from local restaurants to vacation rentals to job openings. You can post a personal ad, send out a resume, write a restaurant review, even buy a book from a local author – all without getting out of your chair.

Recently I made the cyber-rounds to see how a dozen of the state’s largest daily newspapers are doing in the online world. Only a few years ago, one would have had to visit a well-stocked library periodicals room to peer into the news worlds in each region of the state. Today, if you happen to be a displaced Cape Codder living in Lowell, you can read the Cape Cod Times at the same moment the inhabitants of Hyannis or Brewster do. If you’re working in Boston and want to know what’s happening in the Berkshires, you don’t have to wait for The Berkshire Eagle to come a few days late in the mail. And if you want to be current on all the local news in Massachusetts, you can go to dozens of local newspaper Web sites, and get your fill of more than all the news that’s fit to print. Of course, anyone who does that would be better advised to check into get-a-life.com. Except for me. I was on assignment. The mission: A consumer’s guide to the best and the worst of the state’s major Web-papers.

In rating the sites, I decided not to focus too much on appearances. So, Web site design, ease of navigation, how long it took pages to load, and whether there were blinking, flashing banners were not an important part of the grading criteria. Furthermore, as a former restaurant reviewer, I’ve learned that head-to-head comparisons between five-star restaurants and mom-and-pop diners are inherently unfair. The same applies to comparing small, independent, family-owned newspapers with well-heeled, big-city dailies or major chains in terms of total content or breadth of features.

But the Internet is the great leveler; it rewards creativity and innovation. So I judged each site on how well it accomplished its community service mission through Web features like interactivity, links to other services, online archives, searchable databases, audio and video, and electronic commerce.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised. Each site does a commendable job with the basics – putting the day’s newspaper up on line. And on virtually every site I discovered at least one unique or imaginative feature that made the visit memorable.

The sites fall into three general categories. The lowest-ranking sites–the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune being a prime example–scream out, “I know I have to put up this damned Web site, but I don’t know why.” These sites essentially take the daily newspaper, dump it onto the Internet, and that’s it.

The second, more common type–the New Bedford Standard-Times, for example–uses the newspaper as a springboard for presenting a vast array of community listings and services. These sites understand how the Internet works and they are innovative in delivering Internet-based features.

The third type takes the next step and presents a Web site designed to stand on its own, carving out an identity as a destination in its own right. On these sites, such as the Globe’s Boston.com, the printed newspaper has receded into the background and the Web site has taken center stage.

Let’s drill down.

For the most interesting approach to putting up a Web site, check out the tiny Berkshire Eagle, located in Pittsfield, near the New York border. The paper is owned by William Dean Singleton’s Media News Group, Inc., which outsourced the Web sites for all 31 of its newspapers across the country to a company called Regional Network Communications, Inc.

And while journalistic purists may lament the Eagle’s loss of its family ownership, Singleton’s unorthodox outsourcing method is certainly effective. The Eagle’s Web site provides a sophisticated set of offerings far beyond what one would expect of a newspaper that small. The site is chock full of features like free e-mail, chat rooms, online polls, and links to local colleges and tourist bureaus, plus there’s free access to Eagle stories going back a full year. Not only are the community listings exhaustive and searchable (click here for Thai restaurants in Lenox), but people are encouraged to post their own calendar items and add their own reviews of everything from books and movies to local bed-and-breakfasts on a section of the site called “Berkshires Now.”

And serious journalism has a place on the site as well. The Eagle’s special report on a settlement between General Electric and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over PCB contamination was featured prominently when I visited.

For some reason, the Lowell Sun, another Singleton paper, doesn’t have a Lowell Now equivalent, so the site lacks the local listings that make the Eagle site so successful. However, the Sun, in its arts and entertainment section, offers audio selections from popular CDs, as well as movie clips. I watched the preview for the new Star Wars movie on the Sun‘s site.

Not surprisingly, the most impressive site is the Globe’s Boston.com, which has moved up in class from simply battling the Herald to taking on Microsoft’s boston.sidewalk.com and America Online’s digitalcity.com as a portal for locals, tourists, and just about anybody who wants up-to-date info on Boston.

The way Boston.com is designed, there’s an icon at the top of the home page that directs people to the Globe newspaper online, the implication being that the rest of the site is more than just repackaged newspaper stories. Of course, that’s not entirely true; the vast majority of content on the site does come from the pages of the Globe, including the classified sections.

But there’s so much more on the site that it’s impossible to describe it all. If you hit enough links you’re bound to stumble upon something valuable. I enjoyed the multiple traffic cams set up at key points in the city, the link to the state Registry of Motor Vehicles that lets you renew your auto registration online, and a database of physicians licensed in Massachusetts that includes information on the number of malpractice suits filed against a particular doctor and whether the doctor has faced disciplinary or criminal action in the past 10 years.

One advantage that a Web site has over a printed newspaper is the ability to present virtually unlimited amounts of information in an easily searchable format. The Globe site, like most of the others, exploits this advantage to present real estate listings, cars for sale, job openings, and shopping guides. And it’s no coincidence that these categories correspond to a newspaper’s core advertising base. These savvy Web sites quickly realized that if they could bring their readers to the Internet, they could bring their advertisers as well.

But these Web sites also follow the Internet culture, in which information is presented in an interactive way with the consumer in mind. So, the Globe site also includes mortgage-rate calculators, allows job hunters to post a resume, and provides reviews of automobiles.

And the Globe site does its fair share of news gathering, too. There’s a section for late breaking news, sports scores are constantly being updated, and there are links to continuous wire service reports. On a Sunday in March, the Globe used its Web site to break the news of the impending merger of BankBoston with Fleet about 12 hours before the next day’s paper rolled off the presses – the first time Boston.com scooped the daily newspaper.

My only gripe with the online Globe is that it charges $2.95 an article during the day and $1.50 after 6 p.m. for copies of its stories. The Globe’s archives go back 19 years, providing a valuable historical resource and a gold mine for people, especially students, doing research. Searches should be free.

The Boston Herald’s site doesn’t get overly ambitious, but it executes pretty well on what it does offer–job and car search databases and personals presented in a well-designed, airy style. Plus, the Herald provides original content on its Web site and does a nice job highlighting the stories that it breaks online. The online version made the news late last year by being the first to publish a story accusing then-Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle of passing off material from a George Carlin book as his own.

The other site that puts community first and individual newspapers second is townonline.com from Community Newspaper Company, the Fidelity-owned chain of dailies, weeklies, and freebies concentrated in suburban areas.

Townonline.com doesn’t have the resources of the Globe’s Boston.com, and it suffers, in my eyes at least, from type that’s too tiny to read, but it takes a back seat to no one when it comes to interactivity. The site has online chats with politicians and interesting people in its readership area, there are e-mail addresses of local pols, local experts are standing by online to answer real estate and home repair questions, and, in a wonderful innovation, readers can sign up to receive targeted e-mail containing breaking news and features in their home town.

The site has links to the more than 100 towns in CNC’s readership area, including newcomers’ guides and top stories from every community. The site also has a prominent link to the Framingham-based MetroWest Daily News, which serves as a magnet site for a bunch of smaller papers in the region, including the Southborough Villager, Marlborough Enterprise, and Metro West Business Journal.

The MetroWest Daily News site has all kinds of interesting features, from a Readers Choice Poll to Photos of the Week to a collection of editorial cartoons. Unfortunately, there’s no way to search the paper’s archives.

Another CNC paper, the Cape Cod Times, presents itself clearly as an online version of the newspaper. The site has the paper’s banner prominently displayed above the day’s top Cape stories. But there are several pleasant surprises on the site as well, including the Bourne Bridge cam, the full results of the state’s MCAS student achievement tests, exhaustive listings of Cape shopping and vacation rentals, plus newspaper archives dating back to 1997.

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette‘s online effort is called “Tango,” not the first word one might think of when envisioning the state’s second city, but the T & G does a creditable job hitting all the bases with its site. In addition to news from the paper’s vast coverage area in Central Massachusetts, there are city guides, free personals, links to news from the Associated Press, and a primer on the Internet itself.

A newspaper Web site presents a perfect arena for a paper to do business with its customers and the T & G offers people an opportunity to subscribe online and to leave e-mail for advertising reps. Tango has one curious feature, a service called “City Line” in which phone numbers are listed under various categories, everything from “tax notes” to “New Age Notes” to “stain removal notes.” It somehow goes against the grain to send Web surfers back to the telephone to get information, especially since many people have only one phone line and would have to disconnect from the ‘net to use the service. I’d rather see all that information posted on the Web site.

The New Bedford Standard-Times, which, like The Salem Evening News, is part of the Dow Jones-owned Ottaway chain, has a bunch of nice touches. There’s a message of welcome from the publisher, who is probably a wonderful businessman, but should have his knuckles rapped by editor Ken Hartnett for lame phrases like “our little service station on the info superhighway” and “digital macadam.” But it’s still a nice touch.

The site has extensive listings of every manner of community event from pancake supper to whist party across the state’s southern coast. There are online personals, weekly polls, links to Altavista and Yahoo search engines, and an optional registration section that allows the site to gather interesting information on its visitors.

And the Standard-Times site shows that you can never tell where you’re going to run into some hard-hitting, honest journalism. When you click on a specific community, amid all the general information, the phone numbers of town offices, and lists of schools, there’s a summary of key issues facing the town that was clearly written by a seasoned beat reporter and not the Chamber of Commerce.

The Standard-Times also offers an innovative service in which it will set up, design, and register a Web site for interested advertisers. In effect, the site is using its expertise to launch a boutique e-commerce service.

The Salem Evening News falls into the same category as the Cape Cod Times and New Bedford Standard-Times. It makes no bones about being an online version of the North Shore newspaper and then enhances the site with summer guides, town profiles, and community listings.

In what can only be construed as a somewhat clumsy bid to boost circulation, the Evening News has something called a “Plus Edition” of its online venture. Only subscribers to the newspaper can sign up for the Plus Edition, which boasts full texts of speeches, expanded sports coverage, longer obituaries, and a daily posting at 8 a.m., compared to a 2 p.m. posting for the regular edition. I can’t imagine how these features would entice someone to subscribe to the print newspaper, and the whole Plus Edition banner strikes me as a waste of valuable space on the site’s front page.

Of the sites that I reviewed, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune ranked last because it made virtually no effort to do anything beyond posting the day’s paper. However, the Eagle-Tribune surprised me with a feature that the other sites should adopt–useful bios of all the staff reporters, including photos and e-mail addresses.

And we won’t even discuss the Quincy-based Patriot Ledger, the state’s third-largest paper, because it hasn’t mustered its own site, although it does post stories on digitalcity.com. and classifieds on southofboston.com.

Even the Daily Hampshire Gazette, a small paper in Northampton, in Western Massachusetts, has some pizzazz on its site. There’s a forum for UMass sports fans, a place for people to post opinions on everything from the Starr Report to teen issues, and there are links to Web sites of local organizations. The Gazette is the only site I found that conducts actual electronic commerce. GazetteNet won’t challenge amazon.com anytime soon, but it does provide an opportunity for local authors to sell books directly to people who are visiting the site. Just fill out an online order form and the book is in the mail.

Summing up, I found that the state’s newspaper Web sites, for the most part, were effective. I also think that the best is yet to come. After all, these sites are only a couple of years old and the technology is still evolving. But imagine the possibilities… streaming video of local political debates…online used car auctions…instant polls…multilingual sites…electronic tip lines.…The cyber-sky is the limit.

Neal Weinberg is a feature writer at Network World, a computer industry trade publication based in Framingham. As business editor of The Middlesex News (now the MetroWest Daily News) in the pre-Web late 1980s, he helped create a precursor to the Web sites reviewed in this article, a computer bulletin board that allowed readers to scan the day’s headline stories and send electronic letters to the editor.