Blink and You Miss it: Measuring News Readers’ Attention to Interpretative Journalism Cues

ABSTRACT

Studies have shown that newsreaders often have a difficult time distinguishing between different article types and, anecdotally, were oblivious to the text cues that news organizations offered to help make the distinctions. Inquiry into how news readers come to conclusions regarding news content is critical in light of the apparent emergence of so-called interpretative journalism stories—pieces that depart from a straightforward objective approach to the news by subjectively analyzing news content. The goal of this study is to empirically assess the degree to which news readers make visual contact with cues signifying article type, usually with the word “analysis” above the headline. Specifically, the eye movement of 250 college-going US news readers was tracked to determine if they cast their gaze on the textual cues used by two major online newspapers to signify article type. Results revealed that news readers infrequently made eye contact with such cues. Findings give rise to questions about the ways that online news is displayed and understood by audiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Eye-tracking
• interpretive journalism
• objective journalism
• online news
• procedural news knowledge

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Srujan Shah and Adam Cole for their help with this project.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Sometimes, preceding the word “Analysis” are other sub-labels, including “Reporter’s Notebook,” “Critic’s Notebook,” “The Fix,” “The Trailer,” “The Take,” “Politics,” or “Perspective.”

2 Since the data under consideration was represented as a 2 × 2 matrix, the phi coefficient reduces to the Pearson correlation coefficient and can be interpreted in an identical manner.

3 Statistical significance was evaluated using χ² values derived from 2 × 2 contingency tables. Because many of the cell counts were quite small, p-values were empirically simulated using 2,000 random permutations of the data.

4 The AOI frame of the byline in all stories included a thumbnail headshot portrait of the reporter (See Figure 1).

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by San Diego State University.