The study written about in Wired news that said, contrary to print news readers, "[web] surfers focus first on text, ignoring photos and graphics totally" seems suspicious to me. I don't know the methodology, but the article implies that they're throwing all web graphics in the same bucket and comparing users' reaction to that bucket against users' reactions to actual photos in print. Even though, on the web, the majority of graphics are not photos at all, but simply text and icons rendered in a GIF. Real photos are hardly ever used in online news. If they were, I doubt they would be ignored.