ON the day Mark Latham fronted the media with an emotional retort to attacks on his character and Greece won soccer's Euro Cup, a 17-year-old schoolgirl in a saucy pose created her own media whirlwind, toppling Latham from the The Sydney Morning Herald's website as its top-rating story.

Over at the opposition News Limited website, news.com.au, Latham did make it to number one, but just ahead of a story about the shemozzle surrounding Bree, the wrongly evicted Big Brother contestant and another about Pauline Hanson's daughter posing in a bikini for the lad mag Ralph.

The web is unique in that news editors can measure what stories are being read and how long people spend reading them. The results can challenge conventional judgments about news values and, with visits to online news sites increasing tenfold in recent years, they may help to define the environment in which media buyers are increasingly spending their dollars.

On the same day that Bree and schoolgirl Francesca Willis were drawing eyeballs, in Melbourne Age website readers had their eyes fixed on the city's celebrations for Greece's win, but Bree breezed in at second place. At the Herald Sun, a story about the space probe Cassini orbiting Saturn's biggest moon Titan eclipsed the soccer and Maria Sharapova's Wimbledon win. At The Australian the most-read online stories that day were not about politics or even sport, which often tops the ratings, but about judges at a conference in Italy at taxpayers' expense, and two feature articles -- one about a couple who founded a website built around reuniting people, the other about Marlon Brando -- which defies the perception that long articles are a turn-off for online readers.

In Brisbane and Adelaide there are strong local preferences. The top two stories for the Courier-Mail involved a car dealer admitting to winding back an odometer and property owners cheating the taxman.

Continued -- Page 18 From Page 17 The Adelaide Advertiser's top stories were about the state's stagnating workforce and a car accident.

On July 2, when the public had its first glimpse of Saddam Hussein since his arrest in December, the top story at smh.com.au was about a police dog sniffing the wrong man for drugs.

Online news reading habits can shatter preconceptions about what the public is interested in and what it actually reads. And if you think popular stories on the sites of broadsheet newspapers are radically different from the tabloids, then for a significant part you'd be mistaken.

The most popular story last month on The Australian's website was not, as you might expect, the death of Ronald Reagan or the political squabble over the ALP's enlistment of Peter Garrett, the 60th anniversary of D-Day, or even the Euro Cup. It was a story about a "house-sized meteor", seen by a truckie near Bulli on the NSW south coast which was said to have exploded into a cliff. As it turned out, the meteor was probably the size of a cricket ball and had fizzled out long before hitting the ground, but there's no denying that science stories have star status on the net.

Systems director at The Australian, Richard Pree, says science and space stories often get a good listing on Google news in the US, whereas stories about Australian politics rarely do. A listing can attract an extra guaranteed 100,000 hits for a story. In March an Australian story about the discovery of the 10th planet Sedna, which had the jump on most other news organisations, was the number one Google story on the subject in the US.

Pree's theory is that the really big news stories of the day don't often rate as top hitters because they have saturated news sites everywhere, as well as radio and television, so no one site receives a significant spike. He also points out there is a self-perpetuating factor about internet stories, as is the case with two of the top stories mentioned above -- the "saucy schoolgirl" picture that was emailed around the world and the feature about the reunion website.

Pree says sports stories are big for all sites, while property stories, defence and security and opinion columns rank highly for The Australian. And then there are the exceptional hitters, the "click magnets". Sydney's The Daily Telegraph scored one 10 days ago with "Prickly feeling makes sense", a story suggesting that humans have the paranormal power of a sixth sense.

Both Mike van Niekerk, online managing editor of Fairfax's main two websites, smh.com.au and theage.com.au, and Chris Janz, editor of news.com.au -- which are the main news websites in Australia along with the ABC, Ninemsn and the separate News Limited masthead sites -- say online readers still turn to important national and international hard news, but want lighter entertainment too.

The oddball stories tend to be click magnets that people find intriguing and can't resist, says van Niekerk. Often they are stories that "you won't find on the front page of the SMH or The Age," or in the paper at all. "We have the luxury of being able to accommodate all the important news and add a few extra angles," he says. There are also several factors that can skew ratings for stories. Links and referrals from other sites, say the Drudge report or a Google listing, can lead to a huge boost, the physical positioning of the story influences the number of hits and the daily listings on the Fairfax sites of the most read stories naturally lead to more people clicking on them, van Niekerk says.

Janz says breaking news remains the number one area on news.com.au. "It's all about offering different layers of news," he says. "We have our top stories, our breaking news feed and entertainment. The big thing about the web is choice ... I think it has become a more serious medium. Five years ago there were a lot more quirky stories up the top ... to me it's done a total reverse. The regular audience that keeps coming back to us every day is coming back for news." Newspaper websites have the room to diverge slightly from the core character of the newspaper, says van Niekerk, and it's clear people are inquisitive about gossip. "At the same time, it's reassuring that they still read the stories that tell you what's going on in the world and these stories still rate in the top five," he says.

The findings of a study commissioned by Fairfax's f2 to better understand how people consume news online and find out what readers demand from online news services were released last week.

It shows that online news has come into its own as a significant source of information for a growing numbers of Australians during the working day, says van Niekerk. Eighty-three per cent of visitors are going to the sites at least twice a week and 40 per cent also visit international sites such as cnn.com and bbc.co.uk.

In light of the survey, the f2 sites are being updated more than 100 times a day and are incorporating more breaking news. June figures from Nielsen//NetRatings Net View, which has taken over RedSheriff and is the global standard for internet audience measurement, show there are 5.3 million unique visitors a month to the f2 sites and 4.8 million to News Limited's sites. This includes all sites, not just news online.

Jane O'Connell, director of content for Ninemsn, says she is differentiating www.news.ninemsn.com.au from the text-based newspaper sites by offering video news stories and slide shows. It is developing its multimedia component through its partnership with National Nine News. Multimedia packages on stories such as the Mary Donaldson wedding in Denmark in May, which featured a photo gallery and video news stories, have paid off with a spike of 600,000 page impressions compared with the usual 400,000. It was a similar story on Monday last week with Greece's win in the Euro Cup.

Van Niekerk says there is probably about a 10-year gap between the average age of readership online and for newspapers but this is changing as greater numbers of older people use the net more. The online audience is slightly more affluent but most are not traditional newspaper readers who buy the paper every day. Typically, news online is used by people when they're in the office. "It peaks in the morning, there is a huge peak at lunchtime and late afternoon before people go home and it's been like that for years," says van Niekerk.

One defining aspect of the web is community involvement, says Janz. "If someone emails a story to 10 friends and then it goes to another 10 friends and another 10, it can end up rating through the roof." This is reflected in the surprising way some stories take off. An article about a woman's struggle to survive depression that appeared in The Sunday Telegraph's liftout is news.com.au's top story so far this month, yet a story on mental illness is not usually seen as a circulation driver.

Irrespective of changing perceptions about news values, some things never change. People still want to know about the weather. The Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology's website, www.bom .gov.au, is right up there with newspaper sites as among the highest rating.