Journalism Practice

Immersive Journalism: Practices, Challenges, and Futures Across Diverse Contexts

Introduction

Over the past decade, immersive journalism has emerged as a significant site of experimentation within journalistic storytelling and news production. Drawing on immersive and extended reality technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), 360-degree video, volumetric capture, and interactive simulations, immersive journalism enables audiences to experience news events spatially and emotionally rather than solely through linear narration (de la Peña et al., 2010; Pavlik, 2019). This shift from storytelling to what has been described as story-living reflects a broader transformation of journalism into an experiential and participatory communicative practice (Aitamurto et al., 2022).

Existing research demonstrates that immersive journalism has the potential to enhance audience engagement, presence, empathy, and memory retention, particularly in the reporting of complex social, humanitarian, and environmental issues (Milk, 2015; Wu et al., 2021). At the same time, immersive formats intensify long-standing ethical and epistemological challenges related to authenticity, representation, emotional manipulation, consent, and verification (Madary & Metzinger, 2016; Pavlik, 2022). By placing audiences inside reconstructed or simulated environments, immersive journalism challenges traditional distinctions between observer and participant, mediation and experience, and fact and simulation.

Early scholarship on immersive journalism largely focused on technological affordances, audience effects, and high-profile projects produced by well-resourced Western news organisations (de la Peña et al., 2010; Pavlik & Bridges, 2013). More recent research, however, points to the expansion of immersive practices across diverse institutional, cultural, and political contexts, including public service media, independent and non-profit newsrooms, activist initiatives, and regions characterised by economic constraints, platform dependency, or political risk (Paino Ambrosio & Rodríguez Fidalgo, 2021).

At the organisational level, immersive journalism remains unevenly integrated into newsroom routines. Production often relies on external technological expertise, experimental funding models, and platform infrastructures, raising questions about sustainability, labour conditions, and editorial autonomy (García-Avilés, 2021; Koivula, Villi, & Sivunen, 2023). At the audience level, access to immersive journalism is shaped by digital inequalities, device availability, and immersive literacy, particularly among younger users such as Generation Z, whose media practices are deeply embedded in interactive and visual environments (Dolot, 2018).

This Special Issue responds to the need for empirically grounded and context-sensitive research that examines immersive journalism as a situated professional practice embedded within broader processes of digital transformation, platformization, and datafication (Castells, 2009; Deuze, 2012). Rather than treating immersion as a technologically deterministic innovation, the issue foregrounds how journalists, news organisations, and audiences negotiate ethical, organisational, cultural, and political tensions in the production and interpretation of immersive news.

Aims and Scope

The Special Issue aims to:   

• Critically examine immersive journalism as an evolving set of journalistic practices rather than as a discrete genre or technological form.
• Investigate the practical, ethical, epistemological, and organisational challenges associated with immersive storytelling in journalism.
• Extend existing scholarship by foregrounding under-researched contexts, actors, and modes of production beyond dominant Western and corporate newsroom settings.
• Foster dialogue between scholarship and practice by encouraging empirically grounded and practice-oriented research, including newsroom studies, ethnographic approaches, and collaborative or participatory research designs.

The Special Issue welcomes original research articles, theoretically informed analyses, comparative studies, and practice-oriented contributions drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, including (but not limited to) journalism studies, media sociology, digital media studies, human–computer interaction, ethics, and critical technology studies.

Indicative Topics

• Immersive journalism as professional and organisational practice
• Newsroom cultures, workflows, labour conditions, and skills in immersive production
• Ethical, epistemological, and normative challenges of immersive storytelling
• Representation, power, agency, and consent in immersive journalistic forms
• Audience experience, trust, emotional engagement, and meaning-making
• Accessibility, inclusion, and digital inequalities in immersive journalism
• Immersive journalism in non-Western, Global South, or politically constrained contexts
• Independent, community-based, activist, or non-profit immersive journalism initiatives
• Institutional, economic, and technological constraints, including sustainability and platform dependence
• Methodological innovations and critical reflections on the futures of immersive journalism