'Living' the story: Interactivity and the promise of immersion in digital journalism

This doctoral research will examine the developments in interactive digital journalism as a discourse, an aesthetic and a practice, specifically in relation to journalism's commitment to delivering increasingly immersive experiences for a truthful representation of reality in the public interest. It aims to contribute to public understanding of digital storytelling in 21st century newsrooms, seeking to answer the following questions:

-How does interactivity reconfigure journalistic discourse, practices and aesthetics, reimagine the concepts of "textuality", "reading", "audience" and "authorship", and drive the development of new transmedia models of storytelling?

-To what extent does digital journalism deliver on its promise of offering participatory and immersive experiences - i.e. narrowing the distance and creating a deeper connection between the reader / viewer and the subject of representation by 'bringing the audience in the story'?

-What are the implications of media convergence for the process of creation and reception of interactive journalism experiences?

-To what extent does digital journalism remediate existing journalistic and non-journalistic forms and reconfigure traditional genres through innovation?

-In what ways does interactivity reshape traditional concepts and theories of narrative and journalistic storytelling?

Research context, methods and sources

The world is engaging in increasingly interactive forms of communication, ushered in by the development and proliferation of digital technologies, whose affordances have led to progressively convergent creative processes and a multitude of emerging storytelling formats (Landow, 2006; Manovich, 2001; Ryan, 1999; Pearson & Smith, 2015; Uricchio et al, 2016). Media convergence has fostered an entirely new cultural paradigm, which Alan Kirby (2009) describes as "a cultural shift, a communicative revolution, a social re-organisation, [and] a new form of textuality."

One of the most prominent media convergence theorists, Henry Jenkins, defines convergence as "the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences," arguing that it reconfigures media power and reshapes media aesthetics and economics (2006). Journalism has been at the epicenter of these tectonic shifts and re-arrangements. This is a period characterised by trailblazing experimentation, powered by the affordances of digital technology - a DIY, bespoke approach to content developed in certain newsrooms, but also by fragmentation and uncertainty, as the future of these novel, avant-garde journalistic forms is difficult to predict (Lewis & Usher, 2014; Uricchio et al, 2016).

In the years since the advent of the web, there has been a shift in journalism studies from perspectives of predominantly political science to empirical and theoretical sociological perspectives (Steensen & Ahva, 2015), with most recent studies taking an ethnographic approach to explore the cultural changes and shifts in production processes brought about by media convergence (Aitamurto, 2013; Dick, 2014; Dowling & Vogan, 2015; Erdal, 2011; Lewis & Westlund, 2015).