Following up on our earlier post about Jakob Nielsen's findings into how journos use the web, here's an insight into how journalists read online media releases.
As part of Nielsen's study, he used eyetracking technology to see what journalists look at when they're reading online.
It is common knowledge that people don't 'read' when online, they 'scan'. As Nielsen points out, journalists are busy and work under tight deadlines, so PR pages should be designed to cater for their needs.
Below is an example from the eyetracking research showing a journalist reviewing a list of financial statements for American Airlines' parent corporation. The journos eyes skipped the "blah-blah text" at the top and went straight for the list of items. And most headings got only 1 or 2 fixations.
Eyetracking plot of how a journalist read a website's list of releases
Each blue dot represents one fixation of the user's eyes.
(Bigger dots indicate longer dwell times.)
The following gazeplot shows a journalist reading a press release on TNT's website. The journalist focused on the facts in the initial bulleted list and the second table. The journalist hardly read the concluding paragraphs and mostly ignored the first table.
Takeaway 1: headlines for press releases and other statements must be written so that journalists can grasp the gist by reading only a few words, because that's how they scan such lists;
Takeaway 2: provide interesting lists and bullet point facts - they'll get a lot more attention than paragraphs of text.
Again, here's Nielsen's findings: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/pr.html
Media monitoring
