Immersive Longform Storytelling

Media, Technology, Audience

David Dowling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429948466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A deep dive into the world of online and multimedia longform storytelling, this book charts the renaissance in deep reading, viewing and listening associated with the literary mind, and the resulting implications of its rise in popularity.

David O. Dowling argues that although developments in media technology have enabled the ascendance of nonfictional storytelling to new heights through new forms, it has done so at the peril of these intensely persuasive designs becoming deployed for commercial and political purposes. He shows how traditional boundaries separating genres and dividing editorial from advertising content have fallen with the rise of media hybridity, drawing attention to how the principle of an independent press can be reformulated for the digital ecosystem.

Immersive Longform Storytelling is a compelling examination of storytelling, covering multimedia features, on-demand documentary television, branded digital documentaries, interactive online documentaries, and podcasting. This book's focus on both form and effect makes it a fascinating read for scholars and academics interested in storytelling and the rise of new media.

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Multimedia Narratives

The “Snow Fall” Revolution and Beyond

After the New York Times’ late 2012 publication of “Snow Fall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” dramatically inaugurated a new era of immersive reading online, digital publishers recognized the real reason why longform had failed to thrive in the early 2000s. “We always used to say you couldn’t read longform online,” according to Rob Orchard, editor of the highly acclaimed British quarterly Delayed Gratification. Because early news templates divided stories into multiple pages to maximize advertising space—which left the internet itself teeming with shallow content and distraction technologies vying for the reader’s attention—the assumption was “you needed print in order to concentrate.” Now as new digital affordances have given rise to the latest wave of enthralling multimedia narratives that capture rather than divide reader attention, “that’s not the case anymore,” as Orchard notes, “and I think it was a very simple question of getting the design right” (Kuntze 2016).

The early internet’s ad-laden click-heavy customs were indeed anathema to deep reading online. But since the Times’ breakthrough, a profusion of immersive media products leveraging its signature self-contained design have emerged with embedded photos, maps, and videos in app-like environments. Their multimedia elements are now integrated with written text, working in concert to intensify reader concentration (Dowling and Vogan 2015). Such advances in digital design have delivered precisely the opposite of what we have feared about the death of deep reading in the digital age. Contrary to what we have assumed, technological improvements borrowing heavily from the visual storytelling techniques of cinema have deepened the way we engage with narrative, transforming news consumption from article reading to an immersive multimedia experience.

Digital longform’s repertoire of rhetorical expression has never been so rich, and thus suggests how “The diversity of games that narrative can play with the resources of its medium is one of the many reasons that make the intersection of narratology and media studies, an area still largely unexplored, into a productive field of investigation” (Ryan 2005: 21). This chapter tracks the fierce evolution of digital longform, also referred to as multimedia features and digital news packages, which has joined podcasting as one of the fastest-growing online genres of the twenty-first century. Design innovations have transformed both digital publishing and online reading, which has revolutionized written text by wedding it to—rather than pitting it in opposition against—graphics, sound, photography, and video to realize unprecedented powers of expression through immersive storytelling.

Blurred Boundaries and Broken Rules

The digital production of the New York Times’ “Snow Fall” epitomizes the recent departure from the print tradition of the single-byline story. John Branch acknowledged his debt to the team of graphic designers, computer engineers, photographers, videographers, and data visualization specialists who contributed to the Pulitzer Prize-winning piece (Q. and A. 2012) that was lauded for its “deft integration of multimedia elements” (as quoted in Haughney 2013). Branch, of course, relied on his team of producers not only to create each visual element—from Swiss Institute scientists contributing data sets on avalanche dynamics to graphic artists designing digitally animated maps—but also a staff of editors to integrate them into a coherent narrative. “Snow Fall” designer Graham Roberts’s description of the project as the employment of “a new format of publishing longform stories that attempts to seamlessly combine the written story with multimedia elements” (Roberts 2013) indicates the vast amount of editorial intervention necessary for the successful synthesis of those elements. Platforms such as Byliner and Atavist still market celebrity authors, such as John Krakauer and Michael Sharer, thus adhering to traditional single-contributor bylines. The persistence of journalistic tradition of single bylines indeed earned Branch most of the notoriety for “Snow Fall,” as he was the named recipient of the Pulitzer, whereas Roberts remained relatively anonymous among the team of other designers and computer engineers.

The increasingly collaborative nature of online narrative journalism suggests a shift away from the assumption that fine storytelling is necessarily the product of a single creative genius or lone-wolf reporter operating in isolation (Kovacs 2016). This opens up exciting new possibilities for creative collaboration, as Branch recognized of the monumental achievement of “Snow Fall” (Q. and A. 2012). Foucault’s “What is an Author?” and Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” help illuminate this shift toward the collaborative production of literary journalism, which now weds written and visual aesthetics with computer engineering design. Just as production processes are becoming more networked as the products themselves become increasingly multimodal, their consumption has become distinctly more social. Narrative journalism in the digital age is now more mobile, sharable and open to discussion than ever, as “audiences show an increasing preference for online content,” making the latest serious journalism either a combination of online and traditional or only online (Bakker 2014: 596). The socialization of literary journalistic production has become radically pluralized much in the way that readership has through communities such as Longreads.

The pastiche of sources any author inherits—identified by Roland Barthes (1977), who deconstructs the romantic myth of the isolated writer as individual genius—points to the wealth of influences and data the writer must patch together. Like Barthes’s concept of the author as the sum total of his/her intellectual inheritance, craftily rearranged in a unique expression, so too is the longform journalist in the digital age not only drawing from narrative and aesthetic precedent—whether reflecting or refracting it—but producing in a digital environment that requires teamwork and collaboration with data analysts and designers. “To give a text an author,” writes Barthes (1977), “is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. When the author has been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic” (147). It is telling indeed that the myth of single authorship has now yielded to Webby and Addy awards going to teams rather than individuals. The internet has destabilized the professional identity of narrative journalism, steering it closer to a model of film production, in which various designations including screenwriting and directing receive recognition rather than a single isolated figure.

In addition to the blurring of the category of solo bylines into production teams, the strict division separating business from advertising in news organizations has also eroded with the advent of new digital forms (Banet-Weiser 2012; Einstein 2016). Joe Sexton, who initiated “Snow Fall” from the sports desk of the Times, earned accolades despite claiming to have little technological savvy. Yet whatever digital expertise Sexton lacked, his business acumen in promoting the piece was strong enough to lead him to Twitter as the promotional medium to spark pre-publicity interest in “Snow Fall.” In an interview at Harvard University, Sexton recounted how he had violated several cardinal rules of the profession in order to publish the piece. In the years prior to the project, he had been experimenting with alternative storytelling as a method of promoting and marketing the Times. Among other bold deviations from convention was his placement of a massive photo across the fold of the sports section depicting Walden Pond at dusk with a lone long-distance swimmer gliding through the glass-like water in the foreground corner. The reflective feature profile of Olympian Alex Meyer, a particularly Thoreauvian and self-reliant member of the Harvard swim team, defied the standard coverage of recent scores and highlights, venturing into the obscure yet rich territory of more thoughtful reflective content (Crouse 2011). This ambitious maverick project foreshadowed the colossal one ahead.

The stories Sexton ran began stretching the limits of not only the sports section, but also the standard divisions of news categories. “How are you going to fit 16,000 words in six chapters on a ski tragedy,” of three backcountry skiers who lost their lives in an avalanche in western Washington, “in your story? What section will that be in?” Sexton’s colleagues asked him. “Forget the sections,” he replied. “We are going to create our own section.” In the process, Sexton had made a crucial administrative step allowing for his production team to reinvent ossified routines of journalistic production by breaking “every rule at the New York Times that existed and didn’t exist” in this “unnecessarily restrictive” news organization he described as “simultaneously majestic and hopelessly f---d up.” Graphics editor Steve Duenes showed Sexton a story by ESPN on Doc Ellis’s no-hitter he pitched for the Pittsburgh Pirates while hallucinating on LSD. After seeing its psychedelic aesthetic expressed through an integrated design featuring elaborate drawings and interactives, Sexton felt emboldened to pursue a similar project (Nieman 2013).

Times upper administration was initially hesitant to enlist their support. Then-editor-in-chief Jill Abramson struggled to justify the story as news, since it was neither political nor had any immediate timely connection to an issue related to the latest headlines, a core journalistic element of even the lengthiest features. Any initial concerns regarding the story’s departure from traditional definitions of news were soon quelled, however, by the record-breaking reception of the piece. Its 3.5 million page views boasted an average visit that was ten times longer than the industry norm at the time, making it one of the most forwarded pieces in internet history. Abramson’s internal memo to the Times staff heralded the achievement as “a cool moment in the evolution of our online storytelling” (Romanesco 2012). According to Sexton, the confluence of image and word was the key to its success. “My favorite map is the one that enables you to follow individual skiers down Tunnel Creek, and they would move in time with your reading,” a key feature that successfully met the narrative challenge of covering the experiences of sixteen skiers as they outraced the on-rushing avalanche, not knowing how many had survived, unaware until well after the tragedy that three of their group had died. These were “storytelling challenges far more basic than sexy web-stuff” (Nieman 2013). The discovery of one of the victims is immortalized in an embedded video shot with a Go-Pro mounted to the helmet of a surviving skier who is overwhelmed with emotion upon finding the metonymic ski pole revealing the location of his companion’s body beneath the snow.

Sexton explained that sequencing and embedding the multimedia elements posed an editorial challenge that was fundamentally narrative rather than purely technological. With proper restraint, a powerfully immersive experience designed to sustain and lengthen reader attention could be achieved. “Part of the rationale for doing it this way was to get away from the distraction of having to leave the written story to go somewhere completely elsewhere and experience a video or a graphic.” Instead the idea was to enable readers “to experience those things—at least theoretically—seamlessly” (Nieman 2013). Indeed, blending those elements into a coherent whole in its own self-contained package carried the benefit of shielding the reader from the distractions of the open web.

This “closed system” is “non-referential” (Lassila-Merisalo 2014) in the sense that it creates a cognitive container characterized by an internally coherent news package. Digital longform maintains the feel of a container associated with print newspapers, in which headlines and visuals are arranged to complement one another, as opposed to the distracting nature of the internet, in which headlines are crafted to vie for attention independently as disaggregated autonomous units circulating online (Dowling and Vogan 2015). Interestingly, “Snow Fall” reached the majority of its readers as a shared story through social media, and thus as precisely such disaggregated news. Yet unlike the conventional news template, its multimedia were not indiscriminately tacked on, but carefully integrated into the narrative world as a system of mutually reinforcing referents. By circulating mainly as an autonomous story disaggregated from its publisher’s main landing page, “Snow Fall” represented an ideal opportunity to convey the New York Times brand. Furthermore, its distinct advantage was its vertical rather than horizontally oriented page layout. In digital longform, the visual hierarchy and semantics of multimedia sequencing pull readers down, rather than across, the page to a variety of headlines, so that written and graphic content combine as the main signifying features (Hernandez and Rue 2016; Hiippala 2016).

This immersive design’s cinematic qualities are not without their commercial appeal. In a promotional maneuver common in the film industry yet unprecedented in journalistic media, the Times produced a Hollywood-style trailer to promote “Snow Fall.” Upper administration, however, expressed concern that this first-ever video trailer to promote a single story would only play into the hands of their competitors. “News organizations are strikingly bad at promoting themselves because they believe it’s somehow untoward or unbecoming as their stock price [plummets],” Sexton recalled. After seeing the trailer, his senior editors advised him not to share any portion of it or “word would get out,” clearly a vestige of a bygone era in which editors feared being scooped. Of course, news of the avalanche had already been covered six months prior by local news media, whose stories circulated globally online when the event occurred. Violating their directive, Sexton resolved to send the trailer out late the night before its scheduled release the next day, allowing the promotional clip roughly thirty hours to go viral and stir a sensation on the internet. The Times’ reporters boasting the largest following on Twitter, such as Nick Kristof, then tweeted out the news of this revolutionary piece that foretold the future of digital narrative and multimedia storytelling (Nieman 2013).

Sexton confessed that he intentionally had them tweet out the trailer overnight to circumvent his senior editors, who wanted none of this valuable material pre-released. He returned the next morning to find the “senior editor seething, ‘What the f—did you do?’” to which he replied, “I just gave it to the Twitter guys.” Senior management then demanded the entire project be released immediately. However, “the server they had built for the trailer had collapsed,” and they were unable to release the entire story despite the mounting legions of readers on Twitter clamoring for it. The technical difficulties that caused the delay actually worked inadvertently as an ingenious marketing method to whet the appetite of the audience, thereby increasing demand and circulation through social media prior to the publication of the story by 3PM. “The clouds had been seeded, people were actually looking forward to something.” But senior management saw Sexton, according to his recollection, “as the most heretical person who ever lived,” absurdly asking, “Why would we promote our work?” In retrospect, Sexton knew that “Had we just launched it at three that afternoon” without the Twitter promotional trailer, “it would have looked nice on the homepage and everybody would have felt good about themselves,” but the fanfare would not have reached a fever pitch in anticipation of the release. This release of “Snow Fall” was the first ever work promoted on Twitter in advance of its publication, now a much more common, if not routine, practice among news organizations intent on generating publicity for a particular feature (Nieman 2013).

Digital longform’s implications for media convergence thus expand beyond the internally coherent multimodal storytelling of its content to its industrial function within the context of the digital environment for news branding promotion. Not only does the piece openly borrow cinematic tropes such as establishing shots and wipe transitions through graphic animated fly-over mapping, looping videos, and parallax scrolling; its pre-publication marketing also deployed a cinematic trailer. But far from entering the film industry, the Times was instead intent on borrowing its narrative power not only to enhance its journalistic storytelling, but to promote its brand. Indeed, Sexton’s concern was to market both “Snow Fall” and the Times brand. In the process, he had defied two cardinal rules of journalistic practice:...