Previous research has shown decreasing interest and low comprehension of traditional news, particularly in young audiences. As an alternative to traditional news formats, storytelling is often said to improve understanding of news. In our experimental study with N = 706 adolescents aged 12–17 years, we test such effects, comparing traditional and narrative news in terms of comprehension as well as involvement. Findings suggest that narrative news does not enhance information processing in general, but only for adolescents who are lacking issue knowledge. We attribute this result to the structure of narrative news which requires less background knowledge for constructing a mental model of the reported news content. Additionally, for one of the two tested articles, narrative news elicited stronger affective and cognitive involvement, which in turn had no effect on information processing. Implications of our findings for further research and practice in journalism are discussed.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.