Journalism in the Age of Virtual Reality

How Experiential Media Are Transforming News

John Pavlik

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• ISBN:
  9780231545518
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

With the advent of the internet and handheld or wearable media systems that plunge the user into 360º video, augmented—or virtual reality—technology is changing how stories are told and created. In this book, John V. Pavlik argues that a new form of mediated communication has emerged: experiential news. Experiential media delivers not just news stories but also news experiences, in which the consumer engages news as a participant or virtual eyewitness in immersive, multisensory, and interactive narratives.

Pavlik describes and analyzes new tools and approaches that allow journalists to tell stories that go beyond text and image. He delves into developing forms such as virtual reality, haptic technologies, interactive documentaries, and drone media, presenting the principles of how to design and frame a story using these techniques. Pavlik warns that although experiential news can heighten user engagement and increase understanding, it may also fuel the transformation of fake news into artificial realities, and he discusses the standards of ethics and accuracy needed to build public trust in journalism in the age of virtual reality. Journalism in the Age of Virtual Reality offers important lessons for practitioners seeking to produce quality experiential news and those interested in the ethical considerations that experiential media raise for journalism and the public.

CHAPTER ONE

Experiential Stories

Situating the Transformation of Journalism in Historical Context

Journalism content, or news, is evolving through three basic stages of development. For most of history, the content of journalism has emphasized the telling of the story.1 Town criers notwithstanding, early media forms were largely limited to textual formats, whether carved as hieroglyphics on stone tablets in the time of the ancient Egyptians or printed in bound books in the time of Johannes Gutenberg. With the advent of large-circulation printed newspapers and mass communication in the nineteenth century, text-based narratives continued as the dominant form of mediated communication, and the presentation of news was largely limited to these formats.

The invention of photographic technologies, motion pictures, and wireless and wired communication laid the foundation for a shift in the narrative form of media and news. Radio communication continued the linear story-telling narrative form in a spoken audio environment that was based heavily on the written word. More visually oriented media soon became increasingly dominant. The twentieth century ushered in sweeping changes to the most popular narrative media forms, putting increasing emphasis on the sight and sound dimensions of story telling with the growth of motion pictures, television, radio, and sophisticated publishing platforms for printed media such as magazines and newspapers.

The advance of high-speed internet, mobile and wearable technology, and a spectrum of other digital developments has set the stage for the emergence of experiential media (EM) and experiential news.2 Whether in handheld or wearable media systems that deliver to the user 360-degree video, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR); advanced digital video platforms such as ultra-high-definition (UHD) and three-dimensional television; or other networked environments such as interactive speakers, media are poised to deliver not just stories but news experiences. In these experiential media forms, the individual engages content as a participant in multisensory, interactive narratives including news. Immersive environments are those that envelop individuals (or groups) or allow them to enter into a virtual space. Immersion helps to transform the individual from audience member into user and even to participate in media content or news stories. Kinetic (motional) and haptic (tactile) forms of media, including many handheld and wearable technologies, are looming on the near-term horizon to further drive this shift toward experiential media and news. A sense of presence in the story is an increasing quality of the user’s experience with media content.3

Though they seem quite new, experiential media have been in development for centuries, especially in the underlying arena of wearable technologies. Wearables date to at least seventeenth-century China, where inventors in the Qing dynasty developed an abacus ring to serve as a miniature counting device.4 In Europe in the late eighteenth century (1780) the pedometer was developed to measure walking. A century later (1965) the first exoskeleton was developed (though prototypes date to the 1800s) to enhance human action via a wearable platform.

Recent years have seen a rapid acceleration in the development of underlying experiential technologies. In 1989 computer scientist and mathematician Steve Mann designed the first wearable computer capable of image and sound capture, processing, and wireless transmission.5 In 2000 the Ericsson company introduced the mobile-phone-enabled Bluetooth wearable earpiece, advancing miniaturized, hands-free, mobile phone operation.6 The first lightweight, commercial wearable camera, the GoPro Hero, emerged in 2004, although the device used thirty-five-millimeter film. A digital version of the wearable camera with a ten-second video capacity was launched in 2006. In 2013 Google Glass was the first high-profile wearable device offering augmented reality to the consumer. Glass failed in the general consumer marketplace, largely because of an adverse social reaction, with many in the public viewing the use of Glass by others as a potential invasion of privacy. Initially, public reactions to encounters with people wearing Glass were curiosity and a sense of novelty, but within a few weeks or months, many people who saw someone wearing Glass realized they were not only being watched but were likely being recorded in video and that the video was being uploaded to the internet, and they did not like that. In one notorious case, a technology writer wearing Glass in a San Francisco bar was apparently assaulted by other bar patrons who were upset over the fact that videos of their drinking and other bar activities were being uploaded online. The Glass wearer’s video went viral as a first-person eyewitness account of how things could go wrong with head-worn AR.7

Yet Google’s early foray into the consumer-wearable AR marketplace helped to set the stage for more successful contemporary AR eyewear that emerged in 2018, including a public that was apparently more willing to accept wearable technology (in that it has not generated a public backlash). Google also continued its entry into experiential media, debuting the better-received Google Cardboard, a low-cost virtual-reality headset that operates via a smartphone, such as an iPhone or Android device. Recent years have witnessed an onslaught of numerous other wearable digital devices in the experiential media realm, including a spectrum of head-mounted VR displays and handheld virtual-touch systems. These wearable technologies have not only transformed the user interface but also laid a foundation for the emergence of experiential media on a global scale and for the advance of experiential news.

ELEMENTS OF A JOURNALISM STORY

Before examining the ways in which experiential media are allowing journalists to tell stories in new ways, it is helpful to describe the more traditional and foundational elements of the news story. Journalism has long played a vital role in reporting news and information and providing opinion guidance for the public. These roles have been seen as particularly crucial for preserving and protecting the health of democratic societies, especially in helping the electorate make informed choices.

As digitization has transformed the media and communication environment, traditional news media have faced an increasing crisis with regard to their presence and influence in the arena of public communication and discourse. This crisis includes a loss of audience—consumers of news—as well as a loss of advertising sponsorship, which is a primary financial foundation for much of the journalism industry, especially in the United States. The public has migrated to digital communication platforms including social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter and online search engines such as Google (now part of corporate behemoth Alphabet Inc., which also owns YouTube). Not surprisingly, marketers have increasingly invested their resources in these digital platforms to employ highly efficient, algorithm-driven media to engage consumers with their advertising messages. Traditional news and entertainment media organizations have seen their revenues drop, and in response they have sought new business models, often increasingly based on digital subscriptions or other data-driven advertising models. News leadership has also encouraged innovation in story-telling forms, such as interactive documentaries, which utilize the digital media that are increasingly favored by both the public and marketers. These new story-telling forms require changes in journalistic practices and work methods as journalists must learn to use new tools such as virtual reality to tell their stories. Achieving this adaptation has challenged many news organizations around the world.

In journalism, a news story consists of three main elements: the facts, the sources of information that the reporter relies upon, and the presentation of the story. Fake news aside, a journalistic story does not mean a fable. It is a story that represents the real world as observed and reported by journalists. The story in journalism is not imagined or subject to embellishment; it is based on facts, which are the identifiable bits of information that the reporter has verified as truthful or accurate, such as who or what is part of the event or issue. The 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and the advent of the Trump presidency propelled journalism, and society more broadly, into a somewhat unexpected debate over just what are facts and what is truth. Former press secretary Sean Spicer and President Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway even propounded the notion of “alternative facts,” a notion that many journalists and journalism scholars decry.8

Journalism is always a representation of the past or an edited or selective presentation of the present or the anticipated future. Though some philosophers suggest that humans can never have a perfect understanding of the truth, it is nonetheless something that journalists and news consumers can and should strive for as the foundation for informed decision-making. Reporters should seek to provide the most accurate, reliable, complete, and contextualized presentation of the facts or of the bits of information they can collect from diverse and reliable sources. Experiential media, I would argue, offer perhaps the most powerful reporting and story-telling tools yet invented to pursue a fuller understanding of our world. Using experiential media, stories can be more nuanced and complete and can be experienced from multiple angles or perspectives. Ultimately, however, truthfulness still depends on the quality of the reporting and the reporter’s integrity to assemble facts honestly and fairly.

Journalists generate stories by conducting original investigations and reporting, which take a wide range of forms. Journalists employ direct observation, which can be translated into written accounts, photographs, video, or experiential news. Reporters interview eyewitnesses to events and expert sources; interrogate documents and records, especially those from the public or governmental arena; and sort and analyze vast troves of data in increasingly digital form. They cull the facts or data from extensive reporting and assemble them into a narrative form called the news story.

In journalism, quality also means thorough fact-checking, which typically involves confirming an alleged fact from a second, ostensibly reliable source. Reporters and editors supplement this with news judgment about what is important and fair, what is in the public interest, and what adheres to ethical principles and practices. News reporting is evolving rapidly as new technologies emerge and as data- and algorithm-driven methods are on the ascent, even as traditional methods are still central.

Stories in journalism deal with real people and places, actual processes and events. Journalists tell these stories in an attempt to answer questions called the five W’s: who (or whom), what, when, where, why, and sometimes how. Historically speaking, these stories (especially when written) often follow a structure that begins with a lead (or lede) sentence containing the most important elements of the story, followed by a nut graph expanding on key elements and providing the main thesis of the story, and then the body of the story with least important elements toward the end. Breaking or hard news often uses this story structure, which is known as the inverted pyramid, as it puts the most important, essential information at the start (forming the wide base of the pyramid at the top), followed by nonessential background information or facts of lesser importance (forming the narrow tip of the pyramid at the bottom), which can be deleted or edited out to make a story more concise.

Journalism stories, especially hard news, of the twentieth century tended to feature a narrative structure that revolved around two dimensions: (1) the most important facts tended to come first, and (2) stories used a structure that implied or assumed a beginning (how the story started), middle (where it went), and end (how it concluded or its consequences).

An example of a standard hard news lede from events of 2015 might be “Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore yesterday.” This lede contains who (Freddie Gray), what (died, stated in the active voice), when (yesterday), where (in Baltimore), and even touches on the how (in police custody).

A typical breaking-news item might report on a robbery, revealing the most important facts of the case and implying what happened first (the robbery and the extent to which anyone was harmed), involving whom (victims or suspects), how the case proceeded (whether the police caught the suspect), and eventually how it turned out (whether the suspect was convicted). This information probably would not be reported all in one version of the story, at least not initially, but would be delivered in a series of reports over time, perhaps days, weeks, months, or even years. Illustrative of this is the 1979 Etan Patz child-kidnapping case in New York City. First reported as an unsolved case, it developed new aspects and frames in 2015 with the arrest and trial of a suspect resulting in a hung jury and finally a retrial and conviction in 2017.9 Various factors affect the relative importance of the different facts and people in a story. For instance, the involvement of a celebrity in a crime greatly heightens the “who” element of a story. Stories generally identify the sources the reporter has relied upon in gathering the facts and attributes those facts to the appropriate, respective sources.

Hard news ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Experiential Stories: Situating the Transformation of Journalism in Historical Context
• Chapter Two. Digital Design in Experiential News
• Chapter Three. The News User Experience: Immersive, Interactive, and Multisensory
• Chapter Four. Encoded Content
• Chapter Five. Interactive Documentaries
• Chapter Six. Drone Media and Beyond
• Chapter Seven. Economic, Regulatory, and Other Contextual Factors
• Chapter Eight. An Experiential News Parable
• Notes
• Index