The impact of emotions in immersive journalism

Abstract

One of the starting motivations for developing the very concept and practice of immersive journalism was concern about the audiences’ general apathy toward news reporting. As Nonny de la Peña et al. (2010, 298) stated in their seminal paper, “An important role of immersive journalism could be to reinstitute the audience’s emotional involvement in current events”. As a documentarist, de la Peña was more familiar with “emotional literacy” than an average news reporter, for example (see Pantti 2010, 176).