Content Access, Storytelling, and Interactive Media

Abstract

New interactive feature journalism explores the boundaries between storytelling and direct data access. This chapter examines the use of interactive resources in online journalism and describes the evolution undergone by the media in recent years, as interactivity has come to be considered an essential element in the construction of user meaning. This vision of interaction as a primarily storytelling element involves recognizing its rhetorical value and the fundamental role that the reader plays in the completion and elaboration of the journalistic message in sequences of disrupted narrative. These new forms of storytelling are revolutionizing basic concepts of interactive documentary, including the role of stories and the user’s direct access to primary information. Assigning centrality to interaction results in transformations that affect the entire information system. Interactive documentaries and structured journalism offer alternative ways of perceiving the role of information insofar as they allow us to rethink relations between information—what are perceived as data, the different actors associated with it: professionals, reporting communities, the media, and the audience, and, ultimately, the text itself, understood in a very broad sense as multimedia, mutable, modifiable, expandable, and transmedia.