Negativity captures attention and motivates people to read and share news. However, negative messaging can harm mental health, bias and distort memory, and discourage action to address a crisis. We tested an alternate route to increasing engagement—evoking positive emotions by emphasizing action to address a problem. In three studies, we found that the emotional framing of news headlines about climate change influenced participants’ intentions to read and share news, real charitable donations, memory for news content, and real-world news sharing on social media. Weadapted a set of environmental news headlines to feature different aspects of each story, emphasizing Crisis (disaster and urgency) or Action (action to address a problem). Across two experiments, we found that positive and negative emotions were both associated with increased intentions to read and share articles,and increased charitable donations to related causes. Crisis and Action framing both increased engagement relative to the unaltered headlines (as originally published by news outlets); the effects of framing were mediated by emotion. We also identified a trade-off: Crisis framing had the strongest effects on immediate engagement (reading, sharing, and donating), but Action framing enhanced memory for news content on a surprise next-day memory test. Lastly, we investigated social media engagement (likes, reposts, and replies) with >25,000 news articles about climate change. Replicating our experimental findings, Action and Crisis framing were both associated with increased social media engagement. Overall, we show that both positive and negative emotions can drive engagement with news, but have opposing effects on memory.