Newspapers

Royals on page one

The top news story in Britain today is, no prizes for guessing, the breakup of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

There are suggestions that pressure was put on William by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Prince of Wales.

Nigel Barlow surveys the angles adopted by the various Sunday papers.

I guess this would be a good time to make an offer for your William and Kate memorabilia, much of which has been produced in anticipation of a royal wedding.

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Online readers last longer

Source: Poynter Institute EyeTrack07 study 

Readers of online news read much further into stories than readers of print news, according to the latest Eye Track study by the Poynter Institute. 

The 600 readers in the study, which was conducted in four US cities, were each given 15 minutes to read whatever stories they wished, while their eye movements were electronically recorded and analysed.

Researchers found that online readers read, on average, 77 per cent of the way through each story they chose to read. Readers of tabloid newspapers read 57 per cent of each story they started, and broadsheet readers 62 per cent.

[It would be helpful to know how the online stories compared in length to those in broadsheet and tabloid papers. It is possible that they were shorter, due to the online practice of chunking content – breaking it into more digestible pieces. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of online stories that were longer than their print counterparts. This can happen when a story originating in a newspaper is enhanced and updated for the online edition where space is virtually unlimited.]

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