Last week, Slate had a piece by Jack Shafer that I only just got around to reading about a comparison between the print and on-line versions of the New York Times. Based on his own experiences, and on a paper recently presented at a journalism education association meeting, the article posits that newspaper readers read more news and retain it better when they read from print than when they read from on-line sources.

The researchers found that the print folks "remember significantly more news stories than online news readers"; that print readers "remembered significantly more topics than online newsreaders"; and that print readers remembered "more main points of news stories." When it came to recalling headlines, print and online readers finished in a draw.

The researches suggest reasons for this might include a lack of visual cues as to the story’s importance (due to its placement on pages and so forth) and more distracting ads and formatting in the on-line version.

It’s an interesting idea, not least because it backs up its assertions with some research rather than being entirely opinion-based. Can on-line paper editors find a way to compensate? If print papers continue dying out, sooner or later they’ll have to.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Clear evidence that online news sources need to decide which is more important: Giving people news effectively; or flashing animated ads for T-Mobile at them. Unfortunately, I think I know which way they’re gonna go.

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