Writing Blogger

That’s the surprising conclusion — to say the least — from a new eyetrack study released this week from the Poynter Institute at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference.

Among the findings were that when Web users read a story online, on average they read 77 percent of the story, compared to 62 percent for “broadsheet” newspapers and 57 percent of a typical story in a tabloid newspaper.

This survey appears to fly in the face of much of what we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe about online copywriting and Web usability in general. While it will take more careful reading — and may apply only to online news sites, perhaps, rather than to Web sites in general — this study is definitely worth a look.

You can see the full report from Poynter here.