MULTIMEDIA JOURNALISM AND NARRATIVE FLOW
DEFINITIONS Convergence, cross-media production, interactivity and multimedia journalism are widely used expressions in scholarly literature addressing the realm of new media development and content production. These terms are keywords in the literature about online media, and thus it is necessary to define these expressions. Cooperation and collaboration between formerly separate newsrooms is generally defined as convergence (Deuze 2007, 140). Steensen (2011, 217 citing Gordon 2003) describes five aspects of convergence: ownership, tactics, structure, information gathering and presentation. Dailey et al. (2005, 151) describe convergence journalism in five overlapping levels, placing convergence on a dynamic continuum that contains different stages of cross-promotion: cloning, competition, content sharing and full convergence. The term de-converging (Tameling and Broersma 2013) is introduced to describe the separation of an online newsroom (back) into print and online sections. Cross-media production is generally defined as media content that travels from
one
media
platform
to
another,
which
requires
some
form
of
translation/adaptation or re-purposing of the content and cross-media ownership or cooperation (Deuze 2005, Erdal 2009). Many studies on online journalism content have traditionally been concerned with three assets of digital technology: hypertext, interactivity and multimedia (Deuze 2003, Engebretsen 2006, Seelig 2008, Steensen 2010). Others (Pavlik 2000, Karlsson 2012) have analysed online news for further characteristics and suggested immediacy, contextualisation, ubiquity, hypermedia, user-generated content, participatory journalism, citizen journalism, memory and personalisation and crowdsourcing/nursing. Steensen (2010) has categorised and reviewed works on hypertext and interactivity and found that these additional assets can be treated as concretisations of hypertext and interactivity. This review uses Steensen’s understanding of hypertext and interactivity and regards them as an integrated part of the concept of narrative structures and multimedia storytelling, arguing that hyperlinks and interactive elements can be regarded as storytelling building blocks in multimodal news stories. 62