Yike Sun, Yong Guo

Yike Sun

13 May, 2024

News headline design, Audience interaction behaviours, Vector Autoregression (VAR), Emotional tone.

This study aims to explore the impact of news headline design features, such as word count, emotional tone, the use of content words, and temporal words, on audience interaction behaviors during the coverage of the Russia-Ukraine conflict by Xinhua News Agency's WeChat official account, with a special focus on interaction patterns under the specific mechanisms of social media and their effects on long-term audience engagement. The research employs a Vector Autoregression (VAR) model to investigate the dynamic relationship between news headline design elements (e.g., word count, emotional tone, the use of content words, and temporal words) and audience interaction. The results reveal the dual-edged sword effect of information-dense headlines, the timeliness of emotional expression, the double-edged sword effect of official color vocabulary, and the moderate importance of using temporal vocabulary. This aids news media in optimizing headline design to attract more audience and promote interaction, while also highlighting the potential negative impacts of overusing emotional tone and official content words.

© 2024, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license