Behaviour in online news reading

Sammanfattning: Traditional publishers of journalistic material have found a new channel through which they can reach the readers namely the Internet. The material is often the same in the online version as in the paper based version, but not enough thought has been paid to how the different media influence the way of reading. The Internet as medium imposes new criteria as to how the content should be published. This study has investigated how readers actually read news published online. How do the readers? intentions and expectations influence their reading behaviour? Eye-tracking technique has been used to get reliable data on how the reader processes and traverses through the material. Eye movements are tightly connected to low-level cognitive processes. This means that eye movements are involuntary. The eyes may be diverted by reflex to areas with high contrasts such as strong colours, blinking objects etc. However, high-level processes, guided by the users? specific intention or interest for their visit, have a strong impact and effectively control what is actually attended to. This means that a persons intentions and interests guides their visual attention. Due to this, eye movements can tell us about what a person is thinking (Hansen, 1994). The high-level processes are in focus in this study. This paper starts by reviewing eye tracking studies on newspaper reading and online news reading undertaken during the last decade to depict the research history in the A report of the methodological lay out for this study follow. Then the results of the eye tracking experiment take place. The results describe in which order the readers prefer to traverse the content and which areas they find most interesting. Different reading behaviour will be described and discussed.