Multimedia Journalism and Narrative Flow

This dissertation consists of five articles and a Summary. Online multimedia news stories intermix media types that have traditionally been produced using distinctive, media-dependent storytelling logics and narrative structure(s). Consequently, the legacy media’s traditional storytelling templates have been challenged and further developed within multimedia storytelling. The objects for investigation in this dissertation are longform embedded multimedia feature stories, the audience’s reading responses to this specific genre within journalism and the perceptions of production of longform multimedia narratives by a group of experienced media workers.
Article 1 in this dissertation is a literature review of scholarly works written on the topic of multimedia since 2000. The aim of the article is to identify gaps in contemporary research, specifically regarding the analysis of journalistic multimedia productions. In Article 2 (in Danish), I discuss how case studies can be generated for the purpose of textual analysis. The narrative flow of multimedia narratives is the focus point of Article 3. Vital flow factors are identified and discussed by analysing two longform linear author-driven embedded multimedia case studies. The study also proposes a modified taxonomy of multimedia narratives, or a development of the triangle model that has been proposed by Hernandez and Rue (2016). In Article 4, I execute an eye-tracking experiment on one of the case studies analysed in Article 3. The analysis shows both convergence and discrepancy with the visual and textual analysis. This part of the study emphasises the fruitful outcome of mixed methods when investigating narrative flow in author-driven multimedia narratives. In Article 5, I investigate how experienced how experienced media workers perceive the production of longform multimedia narratives. Applying a phenomenographic approach, in the outcome space, the study proposes six different collective categories of perception of multimedia production: the learner, the developer, the artist, the collaborator, the publisher and the manager. The study’s findings may influence how competencies are developed, how multimedia production is implemented in editorial rooms and how media workers progress and work in new ways.
In the Summary of the dissertation, the five articles are placed in a scholarly context, and the research project’s position in the field is discussed. In addition, the Summary consists of a discussion of ‘quality journalism’ and ‘narrative flow’, which are central concepts in the presented articles.
The phenomena studied in this dissertation were investigated through a snapshot of a field undergoing permanent evolution. I believe that, within its limitations, the studies contribute to the existing knowledge of narrative flow in multimedia stories, how the audience navigate through a longform multimedia narrative and how a group of media workers perceive longform multimedia production practices.