Believe it or not, journalism organizations actually study how you look at newspaper pages and news Web sites, and publish the results as what are called "eyetrack surveys."

The purpose is simple: To track how your eyes move over the printed or online page.

The premise is equally simple: We can use that information to grab your attention, and maybe convince you to read a story.

The educational Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., completed its first eyetrack survey in 1990. So a generation of newspaper designers have followed its suggestion as to how most readers gather information from a printed newspaper:

* We read top to bottom, left to right. So the top left corner of a page is where we generally look first.

* We generally look at the elements on a broadsheet newsprint page -- like the Yakima Herald-Republic -- in this order:

-- Photos first

-- Then headlines

-- Then photo captions

-- And last, stories.

Poynter published its latest -- and largest yet -- eyetracking survey in 2007, and there was one interesting change in that order:

Now a majority of readers take in the headlines first and photos second.

Not a huge shift, perhaps, but it certainly helps explain why readers complain about headlines more than anything else in the paper.

It also explains why those talented few who are great headline writers are particularly prized.

Consider the challenge faced by a headline writer for any newspaper:

That person, who has the title of copy editor, has to take a news article -- or even a column like this one -- that may be 500 or 1,000 or 2,000 words and distill it down into a half-dozen or so words.

That headline has be to accurate, both in what it says and what it doesn't say. It has to reflect the information presented in the story -- but no more and no less.

It also has to match the tone of the story (clever or flippant headlines are fun, but not over a serious or somber news story).

And it has to be the right size to fit the page design and to capture the reader's attention.

Finally, of course, both the spelling and the grammar must be correct.

Do we sometimes miss the mark?

You betcha.

So do other newspapers and magazines -- to the point that we have our own trade journal that features a collection of our greatest gaffes in every issue.

The Columbia Journalism Review magazine publishes "The Lower Case" inside its back cover, and I'm happy to say we haven't had a glaring error included in that rogue's gallery for several years.

But there we were in the March/April 2002.

An Associated Press story reported that police in Sacramento were seeking a Ukrainian immigrant suspected of killing half a dozen members of his family. All over California people who resembled him were being stopped and questioned. So our headline was:

Police Stop Slaying Suspect Look-Alikes

The current edition of CJR has another great collection, all of which are probably accurate, depending on how you read them. They include:

Ex-cop gets 50 days in stolen golf clubs case

-- San Francisco Chronicle

WIMBLEDON

Federer still riding high on grass

-- Enterprise-Record/Mercury-Register, Chico, Calif.

Domestic violence training planned

-- The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press

Jury says Thurman was stalking victim

-- Metro (New York)

111 dogs seized in Lind, one arrested

-- The Ritzville (Wash.) Adams County Journal

If you'd like to read more about Poynter's latest survey, check out eyetrack.poynter.org. And for more from the Columbia Journalism Review, it's available online at www.cjr.org.

'Tis the season to enter YH-R's 'Christmas kids' contest

With Halloween behind us and Election Day almost here, we are already gearing up for one of my favorite annual traditions -- the "Christmas Countdown."

It astounds me that this will be the 23rd year the Herald-Republic has asked Yakima Valley children and their parents to enter the contest to become a "Christmas kid" and have a child's information and photo featured on the front page each day from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

This year there will be 29 kids in our countdown -- and the deadline to enter is Nov. 7 (you'll find an entry form on Page 5C today).

We hope parents and grandparents will make this a part of their
family tradition, just as it has become part of the tradition for us at the Herald-Republic.