THE EVOLUTION OF ONLINE NARRATIVE JOURNALISM A Content Analysis of Longform Narrative Pieces Published on NYTimes.com Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Master of Arts at the University of Hamburg Submitted to: Prof. Dr. Wiebke Loosen Dr. Jan-Hinrik Schmidt Submitted by: Maria Nayomi Chibana Espinel Matriculation number: 6518579 Born in: Guayaquil, Ecuador Hamburg, September 2014 Page | 1 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Dr. Wiebke Loosen and Dr. Jan-Hinrik Schmidt for their valuable and constructive suggestions during the development of this research work. I wish to also express my appreciation to the Erasmus Mundus Journalism Programme staff and student body for their helpful advice and suggestions during the planning stage of this project. Page | 2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction…………………………………………...............................................................1 2. Theoretical Framework…………………………………......................................................7 2.1. Technology and journalism……………………………………………………….………………….….7 2.1.1. The effects of digitalization on journalism 2.1.2. The role of longform narrative journalism in a digital age 2.1.3. Longform and its digital characteristics 2.2. Narrative journalism……………………………………………………………………………………..14 2.2.1. New Journalism and its precursors 2.2.2. Narrative journalism versus literary fiction 2.2.3. Definitions of a hybrid form 2.3. Narrative journalism from a narratological perspective…………….………………..….22 2.3.1. The history of narratology 2.3.2. Transgeneric narratology 2.3.3. A working definition of a narrative 2.4. Theories of immersion……………………………………………………………………………….….29 2.4.1. The storyworld 2.4.2. Spatial immersion 2.4.3. Spatio-temporal immersion 2.4.4. Temporal immersion 2.4.5. Emotional immersion 2.4.6. Immersion versus interactivity 2.5. State of research……………………………………………………………………….…………….…….43 3. Research Methods…………………………………………………………………………………………...48 3.1. The sample 3.2. Research design Page | 3 3.3. Operationalization of variables and hyp 3.4. Operationalization of variables and hypotheses 3.5. Method of analysis 3.6. Validity and reliability 4. Research Results.................................................................................................58 4.1. Description of the sample 4.2. Results 5. Discussion…………………………………………………….....................................................62 5.1. Interpretation of results 5.2. Limitations of data 5.3. Conclusions on the general research question 6. Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………………………..…….80 6.1. Overall significance of findings 6.2. Implications 6.3. Recommendations for future research 7. References……………………………………………………...…………………………………………….…87 8. Appendices……………………………………………………………………………………………………….97 8.1. List of figures and tables 8.2. Codebook 8.3. Raw coding data 9. Statutory declaration………………………………………………………………………………….…..133 Page | 4 List of figures and tables1 Figure 1: Model of literary narrative communication………………………………………………....19 Figure 2: The narrative communication model of journalistic reportages…………………....19 Figure 3: Editorial classification of narrative pieces per year………………………………………..59 Figure 4: Word count per year……………………………………………..………………………………….….59 Figure 5: Total number of multimedia features per year…………………………………..……..….60 Figure 6: Mean textual and multimedia immersivity scores per year………………………..….61 Figure 7: Mean multimedia-text integration scores per year…………………………………….…61 Figure 8: Story number 11, published in 2009……………………………………………………….….…72 Figure 9: Story number 96, published in 2013……………………………………………………………..72 Table 1: Mean textual immersivity scores by type…………………………………………………….…76 Table 2: Mean multimedia immersivity scores by type……………………………………………..…76 1 Within the body of the text. See appendices for additional figures and tables. Page | 1 1. Introduction When digitalization started to drastically change the way in which journalism was done in the mid-1990s, many in the field began to speculate that narrative or literary journalism – more popularly known now as longform journalism – would become obsolete (Columbia Journalism Review 2013). Since readers would not likely have the attention span to scroll through 10,000 word articles, many believed that news texts, including feature pieces, would become increasingly shorter. “The magazine-reading future, in other words, will be bite-sized. The narrative will surrender to the newsflash. Image will subsume the written word. It is already happening. It can’t be stopped,” wrote Michael Scherer of the Columbia Journalism Review (2002, p. 33). The opposite is true, however. Longform has actually experienced a resurgence online in the last few years (McBride and Rosenstiel 2013). Defined as “lengthy, relaxed, deeply-reported, literary nonfiction” by those in the field (Columbia Journalism Review 2013), longform journalism is now the sole focus of tech savvy startups that are emerging with greater frequency, especially in the United States, while conferences focused on the future of this type of journalism are growing in popularity. In December of last year, for example, one of the most prominent of these – The Future of Digital Longform, hosted by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism – gathered the founders of brand-new ventures such as Epic, Matter, the Atavist, Narratively, and The Big Roundtable, along with editors from seasoned longform outlets such as The New Yorker, ProPublica, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times (Tow Center for Digital Journalism 2013). To further signal that longform is far from extinction, successful new- media initiatives such as Politico and BuzzFeed have recently recruited longform editors (USA Today 2013), while online curators of longform – such as Byliner, Longform and Longreads – have sprouted across the Web, securing sizable followings (The Independent 2014). A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism also seems to confirm the unexpected but welcomed trend: 73% of adults living in the United States who consume news on their tablet read in-depth Page | 2 articles at least sometimes, including 19% who do so daily. Meanwhile, 61% of smartphone news consumers at least sometimes read longer stories, including 11% who do so regularly (Pew Research Journalism Project 2012). Such a counterintuitive unfolding of events has sparked both optimism and curiosity across newsrooms. Most in the industry speculate that the so-called resurrection of longform is mostly due to the embrace of mobile devices and tablets that allow readers to read between tasks and locations, the rise of social recommendation, the emergence of sites such as Longform and Longreads which organize this type of content, and the creation of applications that allow readers to save content and read it later with or without an internet connection (The Atlantic 2014; The Independent 2014; Forbes 2012). For much of the journalistic world, it was officially confirmed that longform could successfully make the shift from print to the digital world – and open up a whole new world of possibilities – when The New York Times’ widely acclaimed piece of digital narrative journalism “The Snow Fall” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 (Nieman Storyboard 2013). Since then, major news organizations and magazines such as the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone and the Guardian, among others, have invested more time and money in creating digital narrative pieces that blend text with sleek visuals and multimedia. The journalistic world was so captivated by the possibilities afforded by the New York Times’ interactive storytelling that “snow fall” actually became a verb for those in the industry: to tell a story with captivating graphics, video, audio, and animations that are integral to the textual story itself (University of Texas Knight Center 2013). Given the growing number of digital media experts that now believe that longform journalism will not only survive but thrive in the digital age (McBride and Rosenstiel 2013), it is timely and necessary to ask how the genre of narrative journalism has evolved in this digital era. Although the consensus among digital media scholars is that mainstream news organizations do not take full advantage of the multimedia story- telling capability of the Internet, several trends have been identified in the evolution of multimedia journalism in general. These include the increase in number and Page | 3 sophistication of multimedia packages, the incorporation of elements native to digital environments such as hypertextual links, interactivity, and the use of features borrowed from digital games and social media tools (Jacobsen 2011). It has yet to be investigated, however, how the digitalization of the news has affected narrative journalism in particular. Questions that necessitate answers not only include to what extent multimedia elements have been incorporated into narrative pieces, but also how these new elements now interact with the textual story, whose communicative prowess in the form of literary and narrative techniques have been accustomed in a pre-digital era to do all the work in terms of engaging and transporting the reader to the center of a riveting story. Now that the storytelling act is done not only through the written word, but images, video and sound, has the narrative nature of the textual story itself in some way been altered as a result of digitalization? Does the incorporation of digital elements