My Dots for Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The Poynter Online folks have been doing some really fascinating work in tracking eye movements of news readers online vs. tabloids and broadsheets. If you follow the link, you should check out the video and the PDFs, both are useful.

Some of the key findings are:

- People actually read more complete articles online, meaning they read them all the way through.

- There are two types of readers: methodical and scanner.

- Alternative story forms seem to work better than consistent formatting. Adding visual display of information, FAQs, sidebars, helps retention.

- Online, people look at nav bars and teasers much more than in print. Print, big photos and headlines are the way to go.

- Action photos draw attention. Small mugshots do not.

Whoa. Oprah Winfrey has selected Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” as her latest book of the month. Just yesterday I was saying that I planned on reading it. I guess it’ll only be the second time I read an Oprah selection afer it became an Oprah selection. The prior one was “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, which was haunting and incredibly well-written.

Quoted: The latest book club selection is a despairing account of a boy and his father lurching across the landscape of a post-apocalyptic world.

So now it really is official, Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day” is permanently out of the Tournament of Books and has claimed yet another another reading victim. 3 out of 4 of the people assigned to read the book didn’t even finish it. That’s not exactly a fair shake when you’re an author notorious for exploding the form of contemporary fiction. I think the judges need to make it all the way through before they can weigh the books on the merits of their scope of vision and achievement.

At least Pynchon finally “lost” to a good challenger. I really plan on reading that Cormac McCarthy book later this year.