1 Introduction
Since its inception, and over the many intervening decades, classic journalistic praxis has been founded on the use of text as a narrative vehicle, supported, in certain situations, by complementary images, tables, and graphs that sustain the argumentative discourse. However, technological advances, and the search for new business models that can guarantee the economic sustainability of media companies, have revolutionized this basic narrative scheme.
The rapid development of the internet has led the media to create digital news initiatives, alongside their now classic print, radio, and television variants. These technological advances have also led to the appearance of the new media offered exclusively in digital format. Web-based technologies have facilitated the creation of new content that comprises much more than the simple static combination of text and images. The ability to incorporate video, audio, and image with the basic text has opened up a plethora of new ways to narrate stories. But, above all, it is the ability to incorporate interactivity in these new contents that has allowed the consumer of these media products to become a central actor in new narrative and communicative forms.
These new narrative forms have not only been consolidated by the advances in web technologies, but also by the evolution undergone by the devices used to consume that technology and those contents. The use of traditional computers, but more specifically the appearance on the market of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets), has meant that the full potential of these new narrative proposals can be explored easily and ubiquitously, transforming the traditional consumption of journalistic information.
But the adoption of these new technologies has had a series of further consequences for the media. The migration to the web has undermined, in part, the business model and the sustainability of media companies. The need to launch a web version that can compete in the market and reach new audiences has highlighted the weaknesses of a model of economic viability based exclusively on advertising. In the web versions, the classic advertising model does not work and media firms are yet to find viable alternatives, such as a subscription-based model, that can substitute it or complement it effectively. This economic problem is also closely linked to the legal protection of digital content.
2 Digital News Media and Interaction
The new ecosystem is built around two critical concepts that give meaning to much of current journalistic praxis: namely, the digital news media and interaction.
The development of the internet, and the continuous increases achieved in connection speeds, has not only led to the parallel launching of both digital and online versions of the leading newspapers, but it also has had much broader consequences. It has led to the appearance of what has come to be known as the digital news media.
The digital news media are represented by a new type of media company that undertake digital or online journalism. Often, these are digital native business projects, without a corresponding print version. The HuffPost (formerly known as The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com) is a good example of this type of journalistic initiative.
These media are characterized by the fact that they generate their content exclusively in digital format and distribute them via the internet, which contrasts with the more passive experiences provided by traditional news media that publish their content via print, radio, and television media (Friedrichsen and Kamalipour 2017). The digital medium provides them with lower distribution costs and opens up possibilities to implement new business models and to experiment with narrative creativity (Herbert 2000; Kawamoto 2003, among many others).
In this context, one of the common traits characterizing the digital news media is the intensive use of interactives in their journalistic content.
In general, interactivity can be understood as the potential relationship of bidirectional dialogue between a system and its user. Normally, this dialogue aims at achieving a specific goal, that is, the carrying out of some kind of activity in the system by the user by means of some kind of action or manipulation of that system.
The main characteristic feature of interactivity is that both the system and its user can alternate their roles as sender and receiver in that dialogue. This is a property directly attributable to the system that facilitates this switching of roles. All user actions are restricted by the system, but at the same time, the response of the system depends on the actions performed by the user.
Systems have different levels and degrees of interactivity, from the lowest, in which the user simply activates the system (pressing “play” on a video on our computer screen, for example) to the highest, in which the system changes the range of possible responses depending on the actions the user makes (playing a video game, for example).
If we translate this concept to journalism, an interactive can be understood as a special kind of digital content with which the user can interact in a reciprocal or bidirectional manner, thanks to its specific structure and design. This characteristic can then be used to obtain alternative narrative resources and resources with a high degree of communicative efficiency from this content. Here, different degrees or levels of interactivity are also available.
At the lowest level, we find those contents that allow the user to decide the pace and direction of the narrative. Contents in which the user can move forwards and backwards in the narrative using the scroll option (referred to typically as scroll telling) is an example of this level of interaction. The interactive “The Dawn Wall. El Capitan’s Most Unwelcoming Route” published by The New York Times in 2015 (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/09/sports/the-dawn-wall-el-capitan.html) provides users with this technique, as they explore the route and ascent of The Dawn Wall on El Capitan made by a couple of mountaineers.
At the highest level, we find those digital projects that allow the user to create and transform new content and to establish new narrative strategies for the consumption of that new content, by exploiting their interactive resources. The report, “Connected China”, published by Reuters in 2013, provides a good example of this degree of interactivity (http://china.fathom.info). In this case, Ren Chua and his team designed a project in which the interaction design of the visualizations in the interface cannot be separated from the information structure. The resulting product is a complex, dynamic system, capable of incorporating new data and of allowing the user to set out on their own journeys and to construct their own stories. Over an 18-month period, they compiled information that they then codified in the database and which they could then base their system on. The design of the visualizations drew on journalistic criteria, and enhanced those solutions that made the complex interrelations visible (Freixa et al. 2017; Qiu and Zhang 2013).
3 A Polyhedral Scenario
The scenario created by the new media cannot, however, be examined from a single perspective; rather, its polyhedral nature means it has to be addressed from more than one point of view. This book seeks to analyze the multidimensional phenomenon of the digital news media centering the discussion around the importance of the role played in it by interactivity.
In meeting this objective, we have divided this book into eight chapters, which can, in turn, be grouped into two main blocks: an in-depth study of the intrinsic characteristics of the interactive products used in the digital news media, on the one hand; and an examination of other, more extrinsic, issues that are affected by products of this type, on the other.
In the first of these blocks, in analyzing the intrinsic characteristics of interactives, we look at aspects related to storytelling, at contents that include information visualization and those that facilitate immersive experiences, and at user experiences associated with these digital contents.
In the specific case of storytelling, Chapter 2, entitled “Content Access, Storytelling and Interactive Media”, examines the use of interactives as a narrative resource in online journalism and describes the evolution undergone by the media in recent years as regards their use of these resources. We show how these new forms of storytelling are revolutionizing the basic concepts of the interactive documentary, including the role of stories and users’ direct access to primary sources.
The next two chapters examine two special types of new journalistic content: those that include information visualization as a narrative resource and those that facilitate immersive experiences. Chapter 3, entitled “Information Visualization in the Digital News Media”, analyzes the added value of content that incorporates information visualization and explains why the classic distinction between infographic-data visualization fails to help us understand new journalistic contents. For this reason, an alternative taxonomy is proposed that provides a more adequate characterization and which allows us to analyze the current use of visualization in the media. The chapter...