Wide and active audience engagement has become a solid basis for promoting orderly political participation and deliberative democracy. By drawing on news value theories, this article sets out to explore how 12 news value elements predict audience participation through political news on Chinese governments’ Weibo sites. It fnds that in the social media era news value theories still have a signifcant value on our understanding of how audience get access to as well as interact with news reports. Specifically, news value can significantly predict user behaviours of commenting, reposting and liking. Moreover, the elements of timeliness, prominence, individuality, controversy, signifcance and proximity impose a strong in?uence on audience engagement, whereby the modes of Weibo discourses should be reconsidered, and journalistic spirits should be respected.