Looking for Efficiency: How Online News Structure and Emotional Tone Influence Processing Time and Memory

The research reported here investigates how news story structure and emotional tone affect news story processing efficiency. Two theoretical frameworks employing the forced-choice paradigm and the free-choice paradigm are used to pose competing hypotheses about how news writing structure (inverted pyramid versus narrative) affects story reading time and memory. Participants browsed a website featuring target news stories. Time spent reading stories and story recall was measured. Participants spent less time reading stories with an inverted pyramid structure yet recalled these stories better than stories in a narrative structure, supporting the free-choice processing framework