INTRODUCTORY HIGHLIGHTS

There's lots to wonder about as Internet news readership grows markedly. Which provider sites, for instance, do readers consider "news" sites? Are they sites mainstream news purveyors would consider traditional?

Will Internet news readers give up serendipity? If they narrow their sources, will they stop encountering stories they hadn't intended to read? Will this cut down on their knowledge of the world?

Is it myth or fact that Internet news readers forego reading a broad spectrum in favor of personal-interest news only?

Web news providers gather statistics of what happens on their individual sites, but we wanted to learn how individuals behave across sites. What do they seek, what do they really read when they sit down at their computers and call up news? Do they read traditional suppliers of journalistic information, or mostly declaimers of opinions? Do they venture beyond narrow information sources?

We began this study four years ago, first videotaping Internet news readers in their homes and offices. We learned that they read both mainstream general news sources and traditional specialty news providers. They had often tried customized news, but given that up "because I might miss something I ought to know about." They read multiple news sites in about 30-minute sessions. They were news junkies, still reading newspapers, magazines, listening to radio news. Most of them had been reading online news for about one year or less.

Two years ago we wanted to learn more. Exactly which types of stories do Internet news readers look at most often? Do they read full articles or only headlines? How important are graphics and photos? How do they move around among sites?

A way to get more specific answers than one can from videotaping is to track eye movements. So we began another study. This one used eyetracking equipment that recorded where the eyes stopped to absorb information. That tells us what our subjects read. We also could track movement from site to site.

We had subjects use their own news bookmarks in as normal a fashion as possible, for as long as they wished. The eyes could be tracked as screens scrolled normally. This is the first such scrolling-screen eyetracking effort that we know about. We found that fewer subjects appear to be news junkies in the last two years compared to four years ago. At least this seems so as judged by their other news consumption habits: often they don't subscribe to daily papers; they don't do much TV news viewing; they do still listen to radio news programs; they have cancelled some magazine subscriptions.

Not many have cancelled newspaper subscriptions, but that's because some had given up subscribing before taking up online news reading. So online news has brought them back to the news reading fold. Most have been reading online for two or more years now. They still don't like customized news much, for the same reason as before: they might miss "something important."

What other questions did the team from Stanford University and The Poynter Institute ask of the data from 67 subjects in two cities? Here are a few highlights:

• Where do eyes go initially after firing up the first screenful of online news? To text, most likely. Not to photos or graphics, as you might expect. Instead, briefs or captions get eye fixations first, by and large. The eyes of online news readers then come back to the photos and graphics, sometimes not until they have returned to the first page after clicking away to a full article.

• Also contrary to much current belief, we found that banner ads do catch online readers' attention. For the 45 percent of banner ads looked at at all, our subjects' eyes fixated (definition) on them for an average one second. That is long enough to perceive the ad.

Graphics other than banners were looked at 22 percent of the time, and also received about a second's eye fixation. Sixty-four percent of photos were looked at on average about one-and-a-quarter second.

Whether text in and of itself really attracts eyes before artwork is difficult to conclude since, often, the text comes up before the graphics. Nonetheless, the provider's first chance to engage the reader is through text. Furthermore, the Stanford-Poynter eye tracking study does show a pattern in which text is sought out and either skimmed or read.

• Online news readers read shallow but wide, while at the same time pursuing selected topics in depth. We conclude this from several measurements:

1) More than three times as many briefs as articles were called up.
2) Twenty four different categories of news as defined by section names were looked at.
3) An average six providers per session were viewed; in some cases, as many as 19 were viewed in one session. Sessions averaged 34 minutes.

The key measurement in judging that our subjects pursued selected topics in considerable depth is the vertical length to which subjects perused an article. Their eyes systematically went over more than 75 percent of the length of almost all those articles presented to them.

This may not be surprising. Most articles that subjects looked at had been purposely selected by them by clicking on a headline or brief. When reading a print newspaper, often serendipity motivates a reader to stop to read an article. That may lead to earlier abandonment.

Following are a few examples of what we learned from eye movements that told us that at least some reading (definition) was taking place:

	Readers and Heavy Readers

• Eighty percent of all participants read crime and disaster coverage. Females were very slightly more likely to read this category, but males were more likely to read more items. (These judgments are based on proportion of each gender to its number in the study: 30 females, 37 males.)

• Sports, surprisingly, was read equally by males and females - 70 percent of the total for each gender. But, no female read heavily in this category, while 11 percent of the men did. In fact, the heavy sports readers were likely to exceed the number of items read per person than in any other category.

• A higher proportion of women read local news than did men, and by a tiny margin also read more heavily in this category. Overall, 48 percent of all participants read local news.

• Somewhat more men than women read national news and by a small margin, also read more items. Overall, 67 percent of all participants did some reading of national news.

In another finding, we noted that interlacing news-provider (definition) sites is a strong news reading pattern online. That is, subjects often moved back and forth between sites rather than read them serially. This duplicates findings from the first round of this study made in 1997 with video cameras.

Favored Providers

Forty percent of our subjects started a session with their local newspaper provider before moving on. And, of the nine most favored providers, seven were newspaper sites and two broadcast ones.

Not all "news provider sites" as defined by our subjects fit what news purveyors might consider mainstream general news sites. In fact, subjects called up non-general news sites twice as often as they did general news sites.

However, mainstream news sources have not been abandoned. Most of the specialty providers present news in a traditional manner that can be considered mainstream. Also, the aforementioned breakdown of favored providers demonstrates the strength of mainstream general news. Another indicator is the time subjects spent with each provider: the maximum was 20 minutes with a non-general news provider, while 46 minutes was the maximum spent with a general news provider.

The fact that Internet news readers are spending more time and activity with traditional news providers should be encouraging to newspaper editors who are in the Internet news world, too. Additionally, early indications seem to show that serendipity operates as readers scroll Internet pages, just as it does when they turn the pages of print newspapers. Asked in the post-reading interview why they had chosen certain articles, a standard answer was: "I noticed the brief (or headline) and it seemed interesting."

Internet news readers are paying attention to the general world, too, not just to their personal interests. Two early indicators of this are the percentages of articles and briefs in the Opinions category (this includes opinions, editorials, letters to the editor, and columnists), which have some reading in them: 58 percent of briefs, and 97 percent of articles opened. Furthermore, 10 percent of our subjects deliberately chose to read foreign providers because they said they wanted get another perspective on the news.

Demographic Data

We completed eyetracking data on 67 subjects in Chicago, Ill., and St. Petersburg, Fla., almost evenly split between the two areas. The 67 subjects called up 211 unique providers for a total of 426 individual visits, counting each person's visits just once. Adding all visits together, participants visited or revisited sites 610 times. In total, they spent 40 hours looking at news on the Internet.

What else have we learned so far from these 67 subjects? Look at our Table of Contents to view what we viewed and to read the details.