Interest matters: The effects of constructive news reporting on Millennials’ emotions and engagement

Liesbeth Hermans · Tineke Prins

53 citations0/0 files storedJournalism

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Media Studies and Communication Journalism and Media Studies Communication and COVID-19 Impact

Abstract

News media seem to have insufficient knowledge on how to reach Millennials. An important question is how professional journalism can prevent the disillusion that a growing number of Millennials experience when consuming news. Constructive journalism is often propagated as a way to improve the well-being and engagement of readers. To test this, the current study investigated the effects of constructive news on emotions and online engagement. In an experiment, 20–40-year-old participants ( n = 341) read a story containing constructive elements or not. Findings showed constructive news elicited lower levels of negative and higher levels of positive and inspirational emotional responses. Furthermore, reading constructive news partly affected readers’ actual online behaviour: Millennials who read the constructive news ‘liked’ this news more often. These results suggest that constructive journalism might be a viable strategy to attract younger news users, especially when the news topic is relevant to their lives.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 53 citations exist upstream.

References

1988Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.1988Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.2001The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.2000Positive psychology: An introduction.2004The broaden–and–build theory of positive emotions 2007Development and Validation of an Internationally Reliable Short-Form of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)2001The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect 1993When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End

Cited by

2021Mitigating the consequences of negative news: How constructive journalism enhances self-efficacy and news credibility 2021Constructive Journalism in the Face of a Crisis: The Effects of Social Media News Updates About COVID-19 2022The effects of constructive journalism techniques on mood, comprehension, and trust 2022What’s Positive in a Pandemic? Journalism Professionals’ Perspectives on Constructive Approaches to COVID-19 News Reporting

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.