Guest: Ari Nykvist, ”Transmedia journalism as workflow in newsrooms”

At this week's IMS seminar we are visited by Ari Nykvist, who will present on ”Transmedia journalism as workflow in newsrooms”.

Abstract:

The paper discusses if and how news media outlets benefitting transmedia journalism better could cope with the rapid and ongoing profound change of the mediascape in Nordic and many other countries which during the last 10 years has led to declining profitability for many commercial news media outlets (Myndigheten för press, radio och tv, 2019). Two reasons for this are advertising competition from global net giants like Facebook and Google and content competition from alternative media outlets (Abernathy, 2020). This combined with the digital transformation in general has led to altered daily news and media consumption manners whilst declining subscription and advertising income are limiting many legacy media outlets economical prerequisites to meet the audiences growing demand of news storytelling including participatory formats and platforms with content that attract, engage and inform (Tellaría, 2016).

The paper deals with how news media outlets could meet these serious challenges by changing their traditional content production and distribution. Legacy media newsrooms could apply different transmedia storytelling formats in several consociated audience targeted platforms (Gambrato & Tárcia, 2016; Kolosova, 2017). They could furthermore refine their conception of the audience by giving it the option to become participatory and co-creative prosumers (Garcia-Galera & Valdivia, 2014) and thus better consider the significance of a growing convergence, participatory media culture and collective intelligence (Jenkins, 2006). This by developing new synergetic newsroom strategies for publishing on multiple platforms using various content formats preferred by the audience. Traditional journalistic skills could therefore accordingly be supplemented by new non-traditional media content producing competencies both in and outside the newsroom (Looney, 2013).

The paper will outline and discuss a content production model for newsrooms based on multimedia, interactive and participatory transmedia journalism (Moloney, 2020). A model focusing on storytelling that expands a story world by implementing an editorial calendar and a storyboard for multiplatform publishing. This will pari passu strengthen the societal democratic foundation for an unbiased, professional, informative, critical, relevant and democratization favoring journalism also in the future (Pickard, 2020).

The proposed newsroom model for transmedia news journalism includes a more strategic use of participatory formats and platforms. But it does not in any way exclude traditional journalistic formats, other non-interactive formats or new already tested formats like infomercials and infotainment. The model opens up for an updated concept of news journalism executed through synchronized and coordinated transmedia storytelling with better synergy between different content producers within the media outlet and together with the audience.

Successfully implementing transmedia news journalism in legacy media could not only open up for more perspectives and experiences of societal reality thus increasing audience identification and trust, but also enlarge the possibility and expand the conditions for a more transparent, profound and broad deliberative discussion between different groups of society. This as a part of an overarching ethical discussion about the future of journalism as a whole and its continued importance for a sustainable democratic society (Wolfgang, 2018).

You are welcome to join the seminar on zoom by emailing us at ims@lnu.se

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen