Multimedia news storytelling: semiotic-narratological foundations

Abstract

Research about multimedia news storytelling contains several empirical studies, but these lack a theoretical foundation. This article proposes a transdisciplinary foundation of multimedia news storytelling, based on semiotics and narratology. First, the bases of multimedia news storytelling are explained using a hypothetical-deductive methodology and the semiotic categories of ideation-composition-reception. Second, based on narratology, the multimedia storytelling process is described, starting from the pre-compositive stage, in which journalists assemble the stories, to the final stage of navigation by the participatory users. The combination of both theoretical foundations allows us to explain the nature of multimedia news storytelling, based on three elements: 1) syntactic coherence between the multiple languages used, 2) open and collective authorship, and 3) participatory reception by the audience.