Immersive journalism, a “new frontier” of information experience?

Abstract

– In this paper, we study how journalists use Virtual Reality (VR) technology which started off as a form of entertainment to produce new forms of interactive narratives. The paper presents the context of the emergence of this new form related to news reportings and to VR technology in the light of media history and visual culture. One of the main implications of immersive journalism consists in putting the viewer in an environment she/he can explore. It is often described as a sense of presence. We will focus mainly on the VR reporting The Fight for Falluja (2016) by Ben C. Solomon (The New York Times) to study this effect of presence, which is usually associated with entertainment, which becomes a distant presence here, modulated by the writing of the reporting, or by the VR narrative.