The statistics will get distorted as more news sites adopt the approach of white space, big pictures, high contrast, and minimal text on their front page. Desktop users will just stop reading those pages.
At the moment my desktop daily reading order and amount of time spent on the respective sites is El Reg, the Daily Telegraph, and the Independent. The Guardian and BBC News have dropped to a quick glance at the end of the day - which is all my eyes can take. The Independent is getting perilously close to being relegated to that category too.
El Reg was also relegated to that "end of day" glance recently - actually more like "every few days" - until the Firefox userContent.css restored some sanity to the displayed format.
I did try the BBC News on my Kindle Paper White browser - but didn't find that the format conveyed any advantage for that device.
It might be argued that the apparently short attention span of phone/mobile/tablet readers might be because they also find the format too awkward to spend much time on it.