Individual news consumers’ decisions to select specific news articles online are an important part of the present journalistic landscape, spurring scholars’ interest in ‘selective exposure’ and the factors that influence news selection. In the present study, we investigated predictors of young news consumers’ self-selection of individual news articles. We used a dataset containing information on upwards of 18,000 news articles that were published in the smartphone and tablet application of the Dutch children’s news television program. The dataset contained the headline of each published news article and the number of views that the article generated in the application. This made it possible to investigate which characteristics of the headlines were predictive of children’s selection of the article, that is, number of views. In particular, we investigated the effects of emotion and exemplification on selection. The results showed that anxiety-related information and the use of exemplars significantly increased an article’s likelihood of being selected by young news consumers. Information related to anger, sadness and positive affect did not significantly predict selection.

个人新闻消费者决定在网上选择特定新闻文章的决定是当前新闻界的重要组成部分，激发了学者们对“选择性曝光”的兴趣以及影响新闻选择的因素。在本研究中，我们调查了年轻新闻消费者对个别新闻文章进行自我选择的预测因素。我们使用的数据集包含有关在荷兰儿童新闻电视节目的智能手机和平板电脑应用程序中发布的多达18,000条新闻文章的信息。数据集包含每个已发布新闻文章的标题以及该文章在应用程序中生成的视图数。这使得调查标题的哪些特征可以预测儿童对文章的选择（即观看次数）成为可能。特别是，我们调查了情绪和榜样对选择的影响。结果表明，与焦虑相关的信息和示例的使用显着增加了新闻被年轻新闻消费者选择的可能性。与愤怒，悲伤和积极影响有关的信息并不能显着预测选择。