That's News to Me: Readers' Responses to Brief Newspaper Articles

Abstract

The present study extended the exploration of readers' imaginative processes (i.e., spontaneous imagery and emotional response) to a new genre of texts: newspaper articles. A corpus of 50 articles was collected from a well-defined population of naturally occurring texts (i.e., articles with one or more subheadings and three to five paragraphs before the first subheading from the international section of the New York Times). The articles, reduced to titles and datelines and the text down to the first subheading (100–180 words), were randomly divided into sets of 25 which were used in two experiments. Undergraduates rated their response to the story (e.g., familiarity, interest, comprehension, imagery, emotional response) on 6-point Likert-type scales. In both experiments, ratings on all scales demonstrated high reliability and considerable variability across stories. As in previous studies with literary texts and feature journalism articles, imagery and affective responses (i.e., emotional response, story interest) were moderately to strongly related, and both were related to comprehension. Neither general topic nor story familiarity was related to comprehension.