How to Tell a (News) Story? Quantifying the Impact of News Format and Storytelling on Engagement

As social media becomes a dominant channel for news dissemination, publishers are challenged not only to capture attention with headlines but also to sustain engagement with the content. They increasingly adopt storytelling approaches that span traditional and satirical content genres. Yet information systems (IS) research focuses on traditional news headlines and static content features; the effects of storytelling design within and across traditional and satirical news formats remain underexplored. To address this gap, we examine what effects the storytelling features of narrativity and emotional sequence have on engagement and how they differ across news formats (Research Question 1), why they affect consumer perceptions and engagement (Research Question 2), and when and for whom storytelling design enhances engagement (Research Question 3). We undertake four studies, one observational and three experimental. Study 1 programmatically analyzes over 5,000 satirical and 35,000 traditional news stories posted on Twitter by the same publisher. Studies 2–4 use controlled experiments with AI-generated content to test how storytelling features shape consumer perceptions of interestingness and their gratifications, driving engagement. We examine boundary conditions related to news format, reading level, and consumer motivation. Results show that for satirical news, when the reading level is low (simple language), a summary-first structure (low narrativity) and a good-to-bad emotional sequence enhance engagement. In contrast, when the reading level is high (complex language), a linear story structure (high narrativity) and a bad-to-good sequence are more effective. For traditional news, whereas low reading levels can enhance engagement, high reading levels hurt engagement. However, across news formats, consumer motivation moderates reading level effects, with high self-brand connection offsetting cognitive processing costs. Notably, satirical content must surpass higher interestingness thresholds than traditional content to trigger sharing. These findings highlight that engagement is shaped not only by what the story says but by how, and to whom, it is told. We extend theories commonly used in IS by revealing how storytelling design shapes engagement through perceptions of interestingness and gratifications, and we offer actionable insights for content creators.

History: Param Vir Singh, Senior Editor; Yili (Kevin) Hong, Associate Editor.

Funding: This research was supported by the Young Scholars Interdisciplinary Forum at the Fox School of Business, Temple University. S. Kumar thanks Temple Center for International Business Education and Research for partially supporting this research.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.0650.