reverse pyramid readership stats

That's a big ask! Try sending an email to the Advertising section of your local newspaper and see what they say.

re: big ask
I thought that there was standard stuff out there for journalism school that would have this ... i.e., the statistical reasons for the AP inverted pyramid style.

Thus, I think it's a matter of knowing where to find it off-hand ... I'm just having a hard time wading through the tons of readership studies out there that aren't quite what I'm looking for cause I can't come to the right search word combination.

I will do it for my own sake.
Or I will do it for the sake of my sisters.

Sorry, bayinghound, I wouldnt know either - but that would be interesting to know yeah, so I'm bookmarking this thread just in case someone else comes up with the goods!

some of the answers
It's funny cause I know what most of the answers are, more or less, from my previous work in public relations; I just need a source from which to quote on a off-time project I am considering.

Here are some half-remembered factiods, for the curious:

By the third graph of a story, 75% or so of readers don't read any further ... by the fifth, it's something like 95%. (Hence the inverted pyramid, you put the least important information at the bottom so your editor can cut it out quickly w/o worrying about coherence of the story.)

Stories on the top of the fold are something like 2/3'ds more likely to be read than those on the bottom of the fold. (Not sure how relevant this is in the internet era, but there you go.)

The Op-Ed section is read by nearly as many as the front page, and a quarter page ad in the op-ed section generally costs as much as the front-page, presumably b/c of the desirability of the readers.