Week 8 - Transmedia journalism

The Legacy of Legacy Media: Mural of Greymouth Evening Star, Greymouth. Photo: Danielle Hutchinson.

This week’s reading explored what makes a story ‘transmedia’, as opposed to multimedia. One of the defining features is audience participation ‘in the interpretation, change, and distribution’ of transmedia content (Canavilhas, 2018).

I linked this to my previous studies of Clay Shirky’s ‘End of Audience’ theory (2012) which positions modern audiences as ‘prosumers’, rather than passive consumers.

This highlights that newsrooms must now consider the ‘spreadability’ of their stories within today’s media landscape (Moloney, 2011, cited in Canavilhas 2018). For example, I have been asked in the past to provide a selection of tweets that could be published alongside my news stories to encourage cross-platform engagement.

---

References

Canavilhas, J. (2018). Journalism in the twenty-first century: To be or not to be transmedia? In Rampazzo-Gambarato and Alzamora (Eds.), Exploring transmedia journalism in the digital age (pp. 1-14). IGI Global.

Shirky, C. (2012). TechConnect:12 Silicon Valley: Clay Shirky presents "The End of the Audience" [Video via LinkedIn channel]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8ChDh-_y8Q