By Brian Veseling
Newspapers and Technology
Published: May 1, 2006
Excerpt:
This spring, the Poynter
Institute for Media Studies will launch its second major research project to
determine how people really read print newspapers as well as re-examine their
online reading habits.
While Poynter has done two
Eyetrack studies in recent years on the use of online media, this will be the
first substantial print-based research by the institute since the original
Eyetrack Study in 1991.
The time certainly seems to
be ripe for a renewed look at print newspapers. After all, there have been some
significant changes in both printing technology and how news and information are
distributed in the past 15 years and these have undoubtedly influenced newspaper
design and how people process information.
"For sure," said renowned
design guru Mario Garcia, who helped conduct the first Poynter Eyetrack Study. "The Internet has created a new type of reader - more tech savvy, impatient,
more into moving fast through the information. We have better color
reproduction, so issues of color utilization are more cleverly addressed today.
And, overall, we simply don't just redesign in the cosmetic definition of the
word. We rethink the totality of the product: from storytelling (the key issue),
to navigation (the most important second issue), to photo/illustrations/color.
Survival is part of the vocabulary today. It wasn't so much 15 years ago." ...
"The eye goes to the dominant image first and then it goes to the largest headline on a page second," said Sara Quinn, a visual journalism instructor at Poynter. "There's a sequence, and it has to do with dominance basically, but of course the content of the headline, the content of the photograph, the content of the graphic is all very relative, but the eye tracking showed there's a relationship between those
elements."
This time, Quinn said Poynter will be looking at issues such as whether people take their reading patterns with them as they go from print to online. Researchers also will study how people approach different print formats. For example, does the same person read broadsheet, tabloid and Berliner formats in different ways?
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