Narrative story structures and personalization: Approaches to television news storytelling

• Main Author: Bradford, Mary Beth
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2005
• Subjects: Mass communications; Mass media
• ISBN: 9780542380990; 0542380994

Although people claim to receive most of their information on current events from television, past research has shown that recall of this information is poor. This study investigated the effects of writing a news story in chronological order, as opposed to standard broadcast structure which presents information in order of importance. This study also looked at personalization---focusing the events of the story on how one particular individual experienced these events. Using the event-indexing model of literary comprehension, it was posited that stories written in chronological order and have a personal angle will improve memory for information in news stories. The results showed statistical significance in the opposite direction than predicted. Stories written in broadcast structure---writing the main point of the story first then developing the story out of chronological order---produced better memory for information than stories written in the chronological narrative. Additionally, recall for stories without a personal angle was better than recall for stories with this element of personalization. Because the event-indexing model has mostly been tested on literary texts, future research on the event-indexing model should investigate different indices or defaults for news texts. Past research has indicated that literary texts and expository texts are processed differently, although this research has not found a theoretical explanation for these differences. Using theories of mental models, it is important to investigate these differences in order to better understand how individuals learn about the world.