Multimedia news storytelling as digital literacies: An alternative paradigm for online journalism education

Abstract

This article analyzes a journalism student’s multimedia news storytelling project in the format of audio slideshows as required by an introductory course on online journalism. Combining classroom ethnography, semi-structured interviews, content and textual analysis, the study focuses in detail on how the student designs a character-driven, audio-visual story through the theoretical lens of digital literacies and multimodality. The findings reveal the complexity of multimodal and generic design made by the journalism student. It is also found that the design process helps her to assert an authorial stance as an emergent online journalist who negotiates heterogeneity of journalistic professional Discourses. This article proposes a genre-aware, semiotic-aware, critical framework informed by digital literacy studies and embeds a case study in the theoretical framework in order to understand the ‘literacies’ as required and performed in multimedia news storytelling. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are also discussed at the end of the article.