Monday, September 3, 2007

Reading readers' eyes We'll look at this in a "Media & Society" class discussion of the varieties of media research as well as my basic news writing classes... While a lot of media research has to do with the effects of media messages, some studies are more interested in how the media get their messages across, asking relatively simple questions like, "Does anyone read this stuff?" The Poynter Institute has posted a video summary of how it conducted its "Eyetrack07" study of newspaper and news Web site readership... complete with high-tech glasses that record the movement of some 600 readers' eyes. The latest study included broadsheet and tabloid newspapers (tabloid meaning "small format," not "Bigfoot meets space alien") and news Web sites -- two from each category, including Poynter's St. Petersburg Times and that paper's Web edition. One of the study's early conclusions was that the online reader doesn't have as short an attention span as some previously assumed. Other key findings announced earlier this year included: Readers remember more when Q&A boxes, lists, timelines and other forms of storytelling supplement traditional text in paragraphs in a story. Big pictures get noticed in print. Small pictures? Not so much. Same thing for headlines: Big headlines get read more often than little ones. Online readers finished entire articles more often than print readers. The researchers tagged more than 350 elements on the printed and electronic pages, from headlines to podcasts, and coded the video recordings of the readers' eye movements up, down and across the pages. The brief video is a nice introduction to the technique. While I don't expect any of my students to dig deep for the $59.95 "EyeTracking the News" report (being published this month), the book-for-sale page summarizes the information from the video, and a 49-page PDF slide show of the major findings was posted after Poynter's presentation to the American Society of Newspaper Editors earlier this year. Reports and articles about EyeTrack07 and some of Poynter's earlier work are also online... for free. Here's a second video, explaining the researchers' early conclusions about what people actually read. 6:25:57 PM    comment []

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