There's an interesting followup to this post on the same site, this time tying design considerations back to <a href="http://blog.eyetools.net/eyetools_research/2005/02/is_the_washingt.html">revenue</a>:
<blockquote>Content costs money for the Washington Post to provide — they have to pay their reporters to generate it, their IT people to put it on the site, and their ISP for bandwidth usage.
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If people decide not to read a piece of news because they're not interested, then that's fine. But if potentially-interested people don't see entire sections of content because of a design flaw, then they lose money, and their brand is negatively impacted — it will appear to people that the site offers less content than it actually does, and they will spend less time on the site.
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Do they realize they are suffering financially? Probably not... they probably think it's "normal" to have low click-throughs from content below the fold. Just looking at their click logs, they wouldn't be able to realize that potentially-interested people never received the opportunity to click.</p></p></blockquote>