Multimedia Effects on Processing and Perception of Online News: A Case Study of Pictures and Title Length on Headline News

This empirical study revolves on the general question of whether multimedia enhancements can affect positive or negative impression of the websites in the minds of viewers. On Headline News (Toutiao), one of China’s most famous online news platform, both title length and the number of pictures that accompany textual news, work in conjunction, among other modalities such as video clips, animations, and so on, have telling effects on online users’ subsequent behaviours. By examining 80,000 entries, an array of data is extracted including, title length (how many Chinese characters making up the title for each news article), picture (the number of news-related pictures shown on the home page of Toutiao, providing hyperlinks to text-only news article pages), “reading” (the count of each news article being read), “like (s)/dislike (s)” (the count of each news article being liked or disliked), and “repin”(s) / “forwarding” (the counts of each news article being forwarded regardless the number of its being read or clicked like or dislike) by its online users. While “title length” and “picture” are identified as the independent variables in all mediating models, “reading” serves as mediating variable, interacting with both independent and dependent variables. This research intends to explore the way of how two major components of multimodalities, “title length” and “picture” serving as visual additions, mediated by “reading”, influence not only the general reading patterns of online news, particularly in Chinese contexts, but also the more telling behaviors following reading. The results show these two components have their distinctive effects, warranting further exploration despite a tentative theory with explanations have been attempted in this study. More specifically, the first hypothesis regarding the role of the number of pictures providing hyperlinks to text-only news article webpages in determining the likelihood to read through specific webpages by online users is corroborated by the strong positive correlation of the two variables in all three complementary mediating models involving “pictures”, “like/dislike”, “repin”, all mediated by “reading”, and the sheer scale of the sample to represent the general population accessing the page. Interestingly, the other mediating models also corroborate the less important role of “title length” in determining “repin” and “like/dislike”, even though the impacts or content of news articles on “like/dislike” is still unknown with intriguing results, when both “picture” and “title length” lead to positive “like’ and “dislike”, with different effect size in four complementary models, mediated by “reading”. However, the generalizability of the study can further extend to their respective influence of title length and number of images, serving as visual additions to textual information, on on-line viewers’ reading habits such as forwarding, like/dislike, following their reading, in other contexts close to Chinese ones, with their cultural differences and nuances, even though the knowledge produced in this study may be too abstract and general for direct application to other situations, contexts, and individuals alike.