• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.81
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• pp.299-328
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• 2017

This study investigated news comprehension via the social media by comparing the reading of a news story on the news paper. A news story on the social media was suggested to present information in a conversational form, which differs from a traditional reporting style. To compare the different forms of news information presentation, two conditions were created: in a control condition, a news story was written in a traditional reporting form. In the experimental condition, the same news story was constructed in a conversational form. Participants were assigned randomly in one of two conditions. They read the news story and afterwards, they were asked to recall firstly, the core idea of the news story, secondly the whole news story, and finally to answer to the 10 questions that assessed how well they learned from the news story. Participants' responses were content-analyzed and produced six variables, the extent to recall the core idea, the extent to recall the whole story, the extent to recall wrong information, the extent to recall additional information, the extent to recall causally related contents in general, and finally the extent to recall causally related contents in story-specific. Analyses on the six variables revealed that the group in the news paper condition recalled more core idea, the whole story, and additional information than the group in the social media. But the news paper condition recalled less of wrong information than the group in the social media condition. Additionally, the news paper condition learned more than the group in the social media. Regarding the recall of causally related contents, the general causal relationships were recalled more in the group in the social media condition but the story specific causal relationships were recalled more in the group in the news paper condition. The findings seemingly indicated that a traditional news reporting contributes to news story comprehension more than the conversational form. Authors however added discussions and advised that the findings needed to be read under caution.