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ABSTRACT
Customisation features on news websites and apps provide news readers with increased control over their reading experience by allowing them to choose what they can read next. This study investigated how two types of news customisation features could influence news readers’ need satisfaction for autonomy, news enjoyment, news engagement and intrinsic motivation to continue reading with two experiments. The findings of experiment 1 (n = 47) showed that news readers experienced greater need satisfaction for autonomy and spent more time reading news stories when the stories were provided through customisation features compared to the control condition (non-customisation). Experiment 2 (n = 92) found that participants’ intrinsic motivation to read increased when the stories were presented through the simple customisation feature compared to the no customisation feature. Further, news readers’ locus of control types (internal or external) was found to moderate the effect of the customisation feature on perceived engagement.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Di Zhu
Di Zhu is a PhD candidate at Missouri School of Journalism. She is interested in understanding how audience pay attention to, remember and emotionally respond to media messages. Theories of embodied cognition and motivation guide her research on the psychological and behavioural influence of consuming information on digital platforms.
Sungkyoung Lee
Sungkyoung Lee (Ph.D., Indiana University) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism at University of Missouri, Columbia. Her research focuses on understanding mechanisms of audience mediated message processing and developing effective strategies for such communication messages.