A picture is said to be worth a thousand words, but perhaps not on the Internet, at least as we know it today. Text plays a more important role than graphics as entry points for online news, according to preliminary analysis of research conducted at Stanford and the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based nonprofit teaching and research institution on journalism. This contrasts with an earlier Poynter study, which found that readers of print newspapers looked first at the lead art element on a newspaper page and then moved their eyes to the biggest headline. The participants used their own definitions of news and selected the sites they wanted to read from their own list of web page bookmarks. Participants in the Stanford-Poynter project were set up with head gear to track their eye movements as they read online news.
Serendipity still plays a role in what people read.
They look around a web news page, and when their eye catches something, they read it. In analyzing the eye-movement patterns, the researchers noticed that most readers' eyes shifted to the photos and illustrations on the screen, but only after clicking on a brief to get to a complete article and then returning to the page with the illustration or photograph. The difference cannot be totally explained by the longer time it takes to display some graphics on web pages, Lewenstein said, because the readers in the study were using fast computers on fast networks where the delay in graphics loading was about 2 seconds or less. Preliminary results also indicate that online readers were willing to scroll down screen pages to read a long story. The conclusions are preliminary because the researchers intend to do more analysis and post additional results on the Poynter website as they become available.