Poynter: Web News Readers Really Do Read

For we writers who make our living hoping you'll read every morsel we've written, here's some encouraging news from the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in Florida.

A study using eye-tracking technology found that readers read most of the stories they single out to read, and get this, online readers read more of what they choose to read than broadsheet or tabloid newspaper readers.  

"Nearly two-thirds of online readers, once they chose a particular item to read, read all of text," Poynter's Sara Quinn told Reuters at the American Society of Newspaper Editors' annual conference where the study was released.

On the Poynter web site, Quinn tells how they did it. They tested in four news markets and worked with the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, the Minneapolis Star Tribune in Minnesota, the Philadelphia Daily News and The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colo. A little more than half of the readers (51 percent) were men and 49 percent were women, all between the ages of 18 and 60. Quinn writes:

Using eye-tracking equipment we noted the number of times readers viewed more than 350 specific elements, such as headlines, photos, cutlines, stories, graphics, blogs, listings and ads.

The data totals more than 102,000 'eye-stopping events.' That's research speak, but it means we've watched every eye movement of 600 readers over the course of about 9,000 minutes of reading 30 days' worth of news publication.

Of course, the fact that the study involved "600 regular readers of news" who had small cameras mounted above their right eyes to monitor what they were reading may have persuaded them to read for longer stretches than most. Taken at its most optimistic, the study upturns the widespread thinking that people who get a majority of their news online are only reading for minutes at a time and read far less than their paper-in-hand reading counterparts. Bad news for employers, perhaps, if that reading is taking place during the work day. But good news for the democracy and for writers and readers who crave longer, in-depth takes on the news in addition to brief digests that catch us up on world happenings amidst our busy days.

Do the findings surprise you? Or are you an online news hound who knew this all along?