Eyetracking Photojournalism

I’ve seen this linked to quite a bit and the research is interesting, but the conclusions seem off to me based on what was tracked.

Professional photographs were twice as likely as user-generated photographs to be shared, according to ratings given by people in the study.

What they forget to tell you is whether the viewer was personally connected to anything in either the pro or amateur shots. My guess: of course not. This should be kept in mind for all the findings published.

The longer or better developed a caption, the more likely it was to receive attention.

Yep. I’ve been saying this all along. Storytelling with photos is great, but adding words is better.

The importance of “storytelling” to photography was mentioned by nearly every subject in the exit interviews.

No surprise here.

The eye tracking seems to support everything we believe in, but be wary of the inability to distinguish between kinds of storytelling and the context of the viewing. It’s not exactly scientific, but it’s another data point in our favor.