Two hypotheses in a study examining the influence of a dominant piece of art on the salience of a news story for readers, thus affecting their agendas, were as follows: (1) a story with dominant art will increase a reader's issue salience more than a story without dominant art; and (2) a story with balanced art will increase a reader's issue salience more than a story with no art. Salience was defined as the importance attributed to an issue by a reader, dominant art as a photograph that is noticeably the largest element on the news page, and balanced art as a photograph which is not noticeably larger than other elements on the page. Subjects, 66 students enrolled in Reporting I classes at Southwest Texas State University, were randomly assigned to one of three groups, each of which received three different newspaper front pages, each on a different issue set in a different design. Results showed that issues manipulated in the experiment were raised on the respondents' agenda of issues, and that newspaper content, as well as how a story is displayed, can have an immediate influence on readers, but that this effect decays over time. The findings supported both hypotheses, though the results may be misleading because the most significant increase occurred for the issue that was dominant on the final day of the study, indicating an interaction between dominant art and recency as the cause of the largest effect in the study. (SRT)