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

Social media has transformed how people consume news, making storytelling design as important as headline design. We examine three storytelling design features—narrativity (linear versus summary first), emotional sequence (good to bad versus bad to good), and reading level (simple versus complex)—and show that their effects on engagement depend on both news format and audience motivation. We find that effective engagement requires conditional rather than universal rules. For satirical content, humor enhances engagement mainly among motivated audiences, where higher narrativity and complex language paired with bad-to-good emotional sequences work best. For less motivated audiences, simpler satire is more effective when presented in summary-first form with good-to-bad sequences. For traditional news, prior work suggests that simple language helps; whereas we find this to be generally true, our results show that when complex language is unavoidable, pairing it with linear narrativity and bad-to-good sequences can enhance engagement. These results provide guidance for publishers who must balance clarity, complexity, and audience expectations. Beyond news, our findings generalize to videos, podcasts, and interactive media, where storytelling design similarly shaped engagement. We also demonstrate how large language models (LLMs) can generate controlled story variations, enabling creators to scale production and platforms to optimize recommendations in audience-specific ways.