This book presents the history of virtual reality and its introduction into journalism, exploring the challenges posed by pushing to make the experience of news a full body event. The problem of interpretation versus objectivity is discussed, as well as the associated ethical responsibilities. Immersive journalism offers the vicarious reliving of a news event with the full body through virtual reality technologies. As virtual reality devices become more accessible, major news organizations such as the New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, CNN, and many more are starting to experiment with this new form of journalism. This book discusses theoretical issues significant to immersive journalism’s goal of using virtual reality to transport audiences into a news site. These include ethical issues concerning image manipulation and the place of the audience’s body in the presentation of a news event. To approach these issues, the book presents foundational concepts of VR technologies that have helped establish the achievability of being virtually present in a simulated reality, as well as current research about immersive media’s manipulative potential. Using a case-based analysis of how immersive journalism clashes or coincides with the goals of journalism in democratic societies, the book examines the possibilities and ethics of such experiences in journalism and news. Original and intellectually provocative, Conceptualizing Immersive Journalism is an important study of this emerging field for students, scholars and researchers in the areas of Journalism and Media Studies.

Bringing together theory and practice, this collection critically examines emerging conceptual, methodological and production frameworks for the study of immersive journalism. Having first begun in academia, the practice of virtual reality/360 ̊ video immersive journalism has seen a steep rise in the professional arena in recent years. Uniting contributions from scholars and practitioners at the cutting-edge of this vibrant field, this book provides a summary of the history, development and key debates in immersive journalism and considers issues such as conceptualising and researching immersive journalism, teaching and producing immersive journalism, and situating immersive journalism in a wider theoretical and ethical context. Each chapter introduces readers to the key terms and concepts in that area and provides study questions to help them engage with the text. Encouraging further enquiry and theorisation, and experimental design and production, Insights on Immersive Journalism is an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in Immersive Journalism and Media.

This book sets out cutting-edge new research and examines future prospects on 360-degree video, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) in journalism, analyzing and discussing virtual world experiments from a range of perspectives. Featuring contributions from a diverse range of scholars, Immersive Journalism as Storytelling highlights both the opportunities and the challenges presented by this form of storytelling. The book discusses how immersive journalism has the potential to reach new audiences, change the way stories are told, and provide more interactivity within the news industry. Aside from generating deeper emotional reactions and global perspectives, the book demonstrates how it can also diversify and upskill the news industry. Further contributions address the challenges, examining how immersive storytelling calls for reassessing issues of journalism ethics and truthfulness, transparency, privacy, manipulation, and surveillance, and questioning what it means to cover reality when a story is told in virtual reality. Chapters are grounded in empirical data such as content analyses and expert interviews, alongside insightful case studies that discuss Euronews, Nonny de la Peña’s Project Syria, and The New York Times’ NYTVR application. This book is written for journalism teachers, educators, and students, as well as scholars, politicians, lawmakers, and citizens with an interest in emerging technologies for media practice.

This volume explores the rise of immersive technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and 360 videos in the newsroom and how they affect newsmaking for journalists, news sources, and audiences. As these technologies offer journalists new and exciting opportunities to connect more deeply, emotionally, and presently with their audience, they also introduce unique ethical and practical questions concerning the collection and use of biometric, sensory, and metadata. Contributors analyze this shift from passive consumption to active engagement in order to investigate the positive and negative impacts that immersive technologies can have on journalistic norms, professional ethics, audience engagement, and data protection. Ultimately, this volume highlights both the potential for these technologies to redefine the relationship between news producers and consumers and the potential challenges their integration may pose. Scholars of journalism, communication, science & technology studies, and digital media will find this book particularly useful.

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.

Immersive journalism is a term used to describe news presentations that use Extended Reality (XR) technologies that blend human-computer interactivity with real and virtual environments in order to create a first-person, experiential feeling of being present in newsworthy places and events. The emergence of XR technologies – hardware systems and software designed to augment, mix or extend virtuality into and with reality – has sparked growing interest in and experimentation with immersive journalism presentations. As a result, some journalists are shoehorning old design practices and techniques into a new medium, failing to fully leverage how interactive immersive media can potentially engage both the audience’s imagination and the body in ways that passive media do not. The objective of this dissertation is to identify and define a framework for foundational concepts that together provide a comprehensive understanding of what this form of news presentation can add to journalism – both in its current form and in future possibilities. The conceptual framework proposed is called FINESSE: Foundations for Immersive Non-Fiction Narrative as Embodied/Situated Simulation Experiences. The framework integrates key concepts from four domains – journalism, immersion, narrative and embodied/situated cognition theory – and offers technology and content-creation guidelines for the types of journalistic production – such as investigative or explanatory stories – that best leverage immersive, interactive media. At its foundation, the framework identifies the professional journalism principals, practices and ethics that have been demonstrated to be consistent throughout time and cultures but which must also evolve to address the specifics of new emerging technologies – requiring a conceptual shift away from news presentations that tell or show and towards a continuum of presence, of experiencing information that communicates phenomenon in ways similar to how people learn through daily interactions with the world. The framework further demonstrates how concepts from each of the four foundations, when integrated, can build upward as a pyramid of requirements to support the audience’s sense of presence in newsworthy events. Conceptual intersections between journalism practices, technological system design, interactive narrative requirements and concepts from embodied and situated cognition theory are identified to demonstrate how they mutually support levels of embodied user agency that passive media do not. The FINESSE framework contributes to the field of immersive journalism by discussing both conceptual design strategies and development techniques that can contribute to immersing audiences as an active participant in a simulated experience of the news.