(Mary Nesbitt)

There was an audible gasp in the room when the Poynter Institute reported at this spring's ASNE convention that jumps are read.

Wait a minute: doesn't other research - including the Readership Institute's - say readers loathe having to turn inside the paper for the rest of the story? Haven't some newspapers abandoned jumps for this very reason? Harrumph. Doesn't this just go to show that you can't trust what researchers say - they're always contradicting each other!

First, let's understand who Poynter was studying, how and with what purpose. (See the slides, the text of the presentation and a short video.) EyeTrack is a method that Poynter has used several times to study where the eye goes on a news page or screen, providing valuable insights into what captures and holds people's attention. In this iteration, they studied 600 readers of two broadsheets, two tabs and the online news sites of the broadsheets.

Like every research study, including ours and yours, it has limitations. Readers wore an eyeglass device that recorded eye movement as they perused a newspaper or news website. No research method can replicate (yet) a fly-on-the-wall experience where we unobtrusively, completely and accurately observe and record what news consumers are actually doing, when and where they usually do it. Even the act of bringing a subject into a study introduces bias, because the person knows she is being studied. Wearing special eye glasses is an intrusion.

So all researchers practice an imperfect science, which is why we say research gives directional, not directive, advice.

Most of the EyeTrack participants (71%) were regular readers - at least four times a week - and thus more attentive to the news and the media by which it's delivered. They were well educated and had good incomes. About 75% of the print readers were methodical in habit, reading from top to bottom and sometimes re-reading, and they consumed more content than did print scanners. (Online readers were split - half methodical, half scanners.) This was not a study of light or occasional readers; it was a study of newspapers' "best" readers (and people who, of course, newspapers want and need to retain.)

I asked Poynter's Rick Edmonds, who wrote a couple of helpful articles on the study, moderated a seminar discussion about the findings and is working on the full report for publication next month, if he could shed some light on the conditions under which jumps were read.

He told me that the study captures "eye stops" as the basic unit of measurement. It was not designed to yield data on what proportion of a newspaper's total stories are chosen, on average, for reading; what proportion of those stories jump; what proportion of jumped stories are chosen for reading - and of that number, how often the jump portion is read. It's that kind of data, which would involve an accompanying, detailed content analysis, that would paint a quantified picture of jump readership.

The study does tell us that eye stops on jumps from lead stories are significantly higher than others, and that, when selected, jumped stories were read at about the same rate as shorter stories. Edmonds said people reported in exit interviews that they did read jumps. Subjects who read the Rocky Mountain News, one of the participating newspapers, and who were specifically questioned about their preferences, said they didn't like them.

So, what would I advise you to do?

1. Don't argue about it. The long-running debate around jumps occupies way more time and psychic energy than it deserves (and please note that it was a small part of Poynter's much broader study.) It's a big distraction from the real issue - scaring up, on a daily basis, enough unique, compelling and relevant content for the readers you're trying to reach. This is an issue for all reader groups, and most acutely for light or occasional readers.
   


2. Focus on unique and compelling stories that engage readers. As other parts of the Poynter study show, once people have selected what to read - offline or on - they tend to read a lot of the story. This makes intuitive sense.
   
   But to get them to make that selection, you have to have the "right" story and be able to make the sale, through headlines, visuals, guiding devices and alternative story forms. That gets back to compelling, relevant content, executed in an equally compelling way.
   


3. Save your jumps for barn-burners. There is no doubt in my mind that most readers prefer not to jump - but will if they find the story riveting. How many of your jumped stories meet that criterion?
   


4. If you must jump, do it in one spot. Readers abhor multiple jumps to multiple pages. And jump pages are often ugly, design-wise.
   


5. Consider good, reader-centric alternatives to front-page jumps. For instance, the Rockford Register Star for several years has used its front page as a summary for the news inside. The Dayton Daily News stopped jumping stories last year after extensive reader feedback indicated readers of all types disliked them.

By Mary Nesbitt (m-nesbitt@northwestern.edu)
Mary Nesbitt is managing director of the Readership Institute.