News media seem to have insufficient knowledge on how to reach Millennials. An important question is how professional journalism can prevent the disillusion that a growing number of Millennials experience when consuming news. Constructive journalism is often propagated as a way to improve the well-being and engagement of readers. To test this, the current study investigated the effects of constructive news on emotions and online engagement. In an experiment, 20–40-year-old participants ( n = 341) read a story containing constructive elements or not. Findings showed constructive news elicited lower levels of negative and higher levels of positive and inspirational emotional responses. Furthermore, reading constructive news partly affected readers’ actual online behaviour: Millennials who read the constructive news ‘liked’ this news more often. These results suggest that constructive journalism might be a viable strategy to attract younger news users, especially when the news topic is relevant to their lives.

The aim of this study was to gain more insight in the way people process information after watching constructive news. In this regard, an experiment ( N = 575, 18 – 90 years old) was conducted to investigate how constructive, compared to nonconstructive, news reporting affected information processing (i.e., factual and perceived knowledge) of television news, and whether emotions caused by the news mediated this relation. For this experiment the topics of two socially relevant issues were used; plastic waste in the ocean and the housing market. Results showed that constructive reporting elicited lower levels of negative emotions and higher levels of positive emotions compared to nonconstructive news. Moreover, we found that the mediation of emotions was largely dependent on the topic of the news. While more negative feelings led to more factual knowledge of the housing market topic, an increase of positive emotions led to higher perceived knowledge scores on both the housing market and plastic waste topic. These results stress the importance for both researchers and journalists to balance constructive news elements in news reporting in order to optimize information processing of the audience.