The diffusion of immersive journalism as media innovation from media professionals’ perspectives

Abstract

While immersive journalism (IJ) has been seen as one of the most significant innovations in the journalism field in the past decade, its advance seems to have been halted. This article studies the diffusion trajectory of IJ in news media from professionals’ experience to better understand how media innovation works in the contemporary media field. What led to the news media’s decisions to start/stop their IJ project, and how were these decisions made? This study approaches these research questions by interviewing 13 experienced professionals from different roles in news media who have worked on IJ. The results identify three groups of core actors in the decision-making process in news media innovation: key users (champions), early adopters, and media leaders and managers. At the same time, there are clear influences from existing newsroom culture and conventions on news media’s innovation activities. Furthermore, the study sheds lights on the environment of media innovation adoption consisting of competing innovations, as well as actors in and out of the media.

Introduction: Post-hype immersive journalism

In the past two decades, the rise of internet-based media and other digital advancements have brought huge changes and challenges to journalism, and new technologies keep emerging (Holman and Perreault, 2023; Nielsen, 2016). Insights into innovation experience and strategy are now much needed in news media to withstand the constant technology evolution (see Hermida and Young, 2021). Immersive journalism (IJ) has been seen as one of the most significant innovations in journalism in the past decade because of its potential to create deeper engagement with audiences through digital storytelling and creating first-person perspectives (Goutier et al., 2021; Wu, 2022). Yet, despite its potential, the rising trend of IJ seems to have halted: since 2018 there has been a decrease in the production of IJ (e.g., Hidalgo et al., 2022; Roose, 2020). Existing research into IJ has mostly focused on exploring its features and possible impact on audiences, but less attention has been given to why the implementation of IJ did not take off.

In this article, we examine the rise and stagnation of IJ as an innovative technology which could aid the struggling field of journalism, as a case of media innovation (Meier et al., 2024; Pavlik, 2021). Drawing on the diffusion of innovations (DOI) theory (García-Avilés et al., 2019; Rogers, 2003), we analyse how media professionals who were involved in IJ projects perceive the trajectory of IJ development in news media, and what they see as barriers or (unrealized) opportunities for its diffusion into the wider journalistic field. The DOI approach describes various stages of adoption that most technology innovations go through when being adopted by organisations, and internal actors in the decision-making of integrating an innovation into the organisations. With this approach, we could better understand the status of IJ’s adoption in news media and the factors behind it (García-Avilés, 2021; Holman and Perreault, 2023).

Coined by De la Peña et al. (2010), immersive journalism refers to a kind of news presentation that offers news in first-person immersive experiences through advanced digital technologies. Essential are the elements of immersion (i.e., the audience feels a sense of being in the news scene), and interaction (i.e., the audience interacts with the news presentation with some autonomy to choose their angle of view) (Baía Reis and Coelho, 2018; Hidalgo et al., 2022). Various technologies have been used to achieve these features, such as 360-degree video, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), etc. Technologies that can generate the illusion of place, plausibility, and virtual body ownership are theorised to stimulate emotional engagement among audiences (Sánchez Laws, 2020), and to boost news credibility (Kang et al., 2019). In this study we take a generalised definition and discuss IJ as the endeavour of offering immersive experience in news, involving various types of news, levels of immersion, and technologies used to deliver such immersion, including and beyond VR.

Focusing on the experiences of various types of professionals in the news media industries, our research aim is two-fold: to understand news media’s reasoning behind the start and stop of their IJ projects, and to explore the process of adopting IJ in news organisations. Accordingly, we could put forward the following research questions.

RQ1

What are news media’s considerations to initiate, develop and shelve IJ projects?

RQ2

What is the decision-making process in news media’s IJ adoption?

Immersive journalism as media innovation

The study of innovation in the news media industries has become more profound since journalism has been feeling the pressure in the past decades to adapt to various disruptive transformations (Luengo and Herrera-Damas, 2021; Meier et al., 2024; Pavlik, 2021). Changing audience behaviours, the impact of internet, social media, and artificial intelligence, and increasingly competitive media markets are some of the developments that shape the field of journalism and, more broadly, the news media industries. Yet, innovation studies have focused mostly on new products and technologies themselves, but paid less attention to processes of adoption, implementation, and diffusion of these innovations (Dogruel, 2015; García-Avilés et al., 2018). Therefore, we apply an encompassing definition of media innovation: ‘the capacity to react to changes in products, processes and services through the use of creative skills that allow a problem or need to be identified, and to solve it through a solution that results in the introduction of something new that adds value to customers and to the media organization’ (Hidalgo et al., 2022: 27).

Among the innovations that are being employed in the news industries – particularly to attract younger audiences – are different narrative formats drawing on mixtures of existing and new technologies, such as IJ (Meier et al., 2024: 195ff; Pavlik, 2021: 57–63). IJ has been flagged as a news format with a large potential for stronger media engagement, particularly through its expected ability to bring audiences closer to the story and evoke emotions (e.g., Jones, 2021; Sánchez Laws, 2020). On the one hand, analyses of IJ stories’ content found that, compared to traditional news stories, news values and frames displayed more citizen and human-interest perspectives while norms of objectivity and transparency were upheld (Wu, 2022). On the other hand, experimental studies showed how and under which circumstances audiences are emotionally affected by IJ (e.g., Greber et al., 2023; Shin and Biocca, 2018). These studies provided guidance for journalists to rethink their immersive storytelling and optimise their IJ usage. Most previous research discussed IJ as a stand-alone innovation process. Although the discussion around IJ is never far from news innovation, in previous academic output IJ was rarely studied against the backdrop of journalism innovation and paid little attention to how news organizations consider the pros and cons of employing IJ.

Goutier et al. (2021) studied the motivations of journalists to produce immersive stories but mainly addressed the tension that individual journalists experience between adopting new technology and journalistic autonomy. However, to advance our understanding of the trajectory of IJ, an integrated and process-oriented approach that addresses all stages in the innovation cycle is essential (Dogruel, 2015). For advanced new technologies such as IJ, new skills and therefore different individuals or even companies are needed to come to a production (De Bruin et al., 2020). Moreover, in light of our definition of media innovation, implementing a costly new format such as IJ is ultimately a solution to an identified problem (decreasing audience engagement) that results in the introduction of a new aspect that gives value to the news organization (García-Avilés et al., 2018; Meier et al., 2024). Technological affordances of VR – the possibilities of actions embedded in the technology; here: modality and interactivity – have been emphasized as such creators of value for IJ (Sundar et al., 2017), but whether they are also viewed as the main advantages by stakeholders in the innovation process remains to be seen.

Diffusion of media innovations

Developed by Rogers (2003), the diffusion of innovations (DOI) theory provides a series of models to understand and evaluate the trajectory of innovations, the characteristics of innovations, as well as the people, organisations, behaviour, activities in innovations. Since its introduction, the DOI theory has been popularly used in innovation research for its wide utility (Atkin et al., 2015). To discuss the implementation of news innovation in the complexity of modern media environment is often like solving the chicken or the egg dilemma: media workers feel as though they follow the audiences, while the audiences seem to flow to where contents are offered by the media (see, e.g., Davis, 2013; Nenadić and Ostling, 2018). The dynamics among all relevant parties in media innovation are sophisticated and not always clear. Therefore, we find the term diffusion useful when conceptualising this process that incorporates influence from various parties in the media ecology. Askarany (2005: 857) defined diffusion (of innovation) as ‘a process by which an idea, product, practice, behaviour, or object is communicated and circulated to those to whom it is relevant.’ Rogers’ (2003) DOI theory provided various concepts and typologies to understand different aspects of innovations, such as the types of adopters and their innovativeness (from early adopters to laggards) and attributes of innovations (e.g., relative advantage, compatibility, etc.). The DOI theory also addressed the innovation in organisations, identified the characteristics of organisations impacting their innovativeness, and categorised different stages of the innovation process in organisations. Rogers (2003) defined the concept of innovation champion as ‘a charismatic individual who throws his or her weight behind an innovation, thus overcoming indifference or resistance that the new idea may provoke in an organisation’ (p. 414) and highlighted the importance of champions in an organisation’s innovation adoption.

The DOI approach is also not new to journalism innovation studies. Recent years see DOI increasingly being used to study the innovation activities in news media (e.g., Atkin et al., 2015; Holman and Perreault, 2023). Building on the DOI approach and interviewing news professionals in Spain, García-Avilés et al. (2019) have developed a model of diffusion of media innovations. This model, describing news media innovations in various forms, extended the DOI approach with insights into the internal innovation diffusion in Spanish newsrooms, and identified common areas, obstacles, boosters, and expected outcome of innovations in the sample. According to García-Avilés et al. (2019), if news media only innovate in response to challenges from the news market, the technological evolution, and the competitive commercial environment without a defined strategy, the innovations would likely be slow and inconsistent. Media innovations of good quality need incentives, leadership, experimental spirit, and creativity. In this study on IJ, we incorporate especially these elements as focus points in the interviews and analyses.

Methods

This research is based on 13 in-depth interviews with professionals from the media industries who have the experience of directing, conducting, or participating in IJ projects in news media. Purposive sampling was conducted to recruit interviewees. Some media professionals credited in IJ productions were first contacted to participate. Then a snowball sampling (Parker et al., 2019) was conducted to reach more interviewees. Since it was difficult to find sufficient interviewees fitting the criteria in one country or context, we did not limit the sampling to any certain country/context. We were able to recruit 13 media professionals from 6 countries, representing a wide range of roles in the news production line. Among the interviewees were directors, innovative journalists, IJ product managers in media, etc. The interviews took place in the form of recorded video/audio online meetings. The lead researcher conducted all the interviews. Each interview took between 30 to 75 minutes, averaging circa 60 minutes. Most of the interviews ended when saturation was reached, i.e., when no new topic emerged from the discussions. Three interviews took 30 minutes each as required by the interviewees’ schedules. In such cases, the interviews were planned to cover a compatible interview structure as other interviews. Before interviews began, participants signed consent forms digitally, where they were briefed about the research purpose.

Methodologically, media professionals’ experiences include insight into both individual innovative activities as well as organisational actions and innovation policies, thus providing vital information on the media innovation process (García-Avilés et al., 2019). As we aim to gain practical knowledge about media innovation, professional experiences from various roles in the media were explored in the interviews. Interviewees were first asked to recall their IJ experiences, then questions followed about the experience and other relevant topics according to the interview guide. As expected, the experiences from different perspectives varied considerably in the interview data, although they all describe certain parts of the media innovation process. To move from work experiences in diverse roles to comprehensive findings about news innovation, this study adopts interview procedures inspired by the theoretical sampling in the grounded theory approach. As such, the interview guide ‘would evolve as insights in the inquiry deepen’ (Foley et al., 2021: 3). As the interviews proceeded, significant topics that emerged from earlier interviews were included in the interview guide for later interviews. This tasks the researcher with identifying topics that are conducive to building theoretically oriented accounts (Foley et al., 2021). In this case, topics were added to the interview guide when they were repeated or emphasized by multiple interviewees, or when they provided intersecting context among interviews, potentially piecing together different perspectives of a phenomenon.

After the interview data collection, we conducted inductive thematic analysis. As such, the coding process was guided by grounded theory, while our thematic analysis did not subscribe to the implicit theoretical commitments of grounded theory (see Braun and Clarke, 2006). The data underwent three rounds of coding. The initial round was conducted after each interview, transcribing the essence of the conversation, i.e., what is being described by the interviewee. The second round of coding started after the interview data collection. Here, common or related codes were built on to form categories. Then a final round of coding concentrated themes that were significant and relevant to the research. The lead researcher conducted all three rounds of coding, while the second researcher provided consultation in the third round of coding. After the coding process, the interview data were analysed and construed with concepts within the DOI approach, with focus on the characteristics and development of IJ and the innovation dynamics in the news media.

Results and discussion

In the analysis of the interview data, we were able to form two clusters of code categories under our two research themes: the adoption of IJ and news media innovation activities. This section first looks at IJ’s development and adoption, including attributes of this innovation, factors influencing its adoption, and realities in its development. In the second part, IJ innovation activities are addressed from the media’s perspective. This sheds light on the decision-making process in media innovation, news media’s innovation strategies and mentalities. In the discussion and conclusion, concepts from the DOI theory and its developments are brought in to explain, construe, or collate with the findings where relevant.

Boosters and barriers to the diffusion of IJ

Perceived advantages and innovation incentives

Our interviews start by exploring what benefits and possibilities, as seen by the media professionals, immersive technology can provide. Many interviewees expected higher power of news storytelling from IJ, which is also widely discussed in academia (e.g., Cheng and Verboord, 2024; Sirkkunen et al., 2021). However, interviewees had different understandings of such ‘storytelling power’. One of the most discussed potential powers of IJ is generating stronger emotional connections, including evoking empathy. As described by a British VR director, ‘it was the idea that the power of VR is the empathy, the heightening of emotional experiences and sensations.’ Stronger visual intensity and impact is also a reason attracting media professionals to IJ. Others see IJ as a ‘space-based’ medium that gives the audience more liberty to choose their own visual perspectives. As such, IJ shakes the editorial-audience power dynamic and provides more angles than in traditional news videos (Goutier et al., 2021). An interviewee described this as inviting the audience to witness the news as journalists do. There is also a belief that immersive media make it easier for the audience to understand elements of the news events with more visual spatial information, such as proximity and urgency.

Although technology affordances offered some core values for the adoption of IJ, it was not the only reason that news workers considered using IJ. Many professionals expressed a feeling of losing the audiences’ attention and trust. An innovative journalist in the UK identified a ‘gap’ between the potential and the reality of journalism at present where ‘there was a lack of trust’ and described his purpose of innovation as exploring ‘ways of closing that gap’. Some interviewees believe that journalism is in trouble in their audience reception, which is echoed in academia (e.g., Nielsen, 2016). To face such challenges, some media professionals resort to innovations, including IJ. Professionals gave reasons to such choice in our interviews. One of them is that IJ or VR brings in a sense of novelty, with which some media expect to attract the audiences. A media innovator from the US explained this rationale: ‘As much as journalism is the importance of the story, it's a struggling industry. So, things like it (IJ) helped drive audience to it, because we were telling a story differently than anyone else was.’ Although it is not clear to the media whether the IJ product is effective at reaching more audiences, the idea of a media outlet offering immersive experience still provides novelty that is potentially attractive and renders news credibility (Kang et al., 2019). García-Avilés (2021: 7) pointed out that media innovations not only emerge as a tactic to withstand the instability in the media environment, but may also offer advantages that play to the audiences’ increasing willingness to interact with the news, reducing the uncertainty of innovative activities, which is crucial in innovation adoption.

Beyond the challenging media environment, many news media also like to be seen as front-running and innovative. The nature of journalism makes them fear to be perceived as left behind. In our interviews multiple participants included ‘other media are doing it’ as (part of) the reasoning of their IJ attempt. This shows that ‘peer pressure’ from other media stimulated the adaptation of IJ. ‘Once other organisations start doing stuff, you sort of feel you should be doing it too’, said the founder of the BBC’s VR lab, citing other major British media such as the Guardian’s IJ project as one of their reasons to start working on IJ. However, media cannot decide on what innovation to adopt simply by following others. A media professional who has worked on IJ in various legacy news media, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, discussed these two media companies’ innovation incentives, strategy, and risks:

‘Both of these institutions are over 100 years old. And the only way they've been able to stay relevant over the years is to make some very difficult transitions when technology calls for it, right? To make the jump from paper to digital, to make the jump onto social media channels… You absolutely must adapt in order to survive. But if you adapt to everything or too often, you also pivot too hard into one medium or into one platform. You're also creating a situation where you're potentially endangering your organizations.’

Here, innovation is seen as an imperative need for news media to maintain their relevance (see Meier et al., 2024). In the meantime, the risks challenge news media to make the right innovation decision at the right time. According to this interviewee, her work with IJ in these media is part of their endeavour to be IJ-ready if/when they decide to make the jump.

Turbulence in media business and technology

In the media innovation of IJ, the technologies and internet technology companies also took a front-row seat. Major internet technology companies such as Google and Samsung, also known as the tech giants (e.g., Whittaker, 2019), have been the most-mentioned party besides news media in the interviews. According to the interviewees, the technology companies were initially a promoter of IJ (see also Pavlik, 2021: 57–63). The tech giants were earlier to be ready with immersive hardware products, platforms, and financial investments, and therefore were looking to news media for contents and users. They reached out to news media, provided technical and financial support, and set up cooperations to incentivise news media to start producing IJ. Most interviewees saw no conflict of interest or interference in news-reporting in such cooperation. Some professionals from non-profit public service media did express a fear of missing out due to their non-commercial rules. However, the tech giants’ interest in immersive technology later faded, and subsequently their support for IJ also stopped. As the tech giants controlled many major platforms that distributed media content, interviewees also noticed that these platforms’ algorithm directing viewing traffic stopped favouring immersive media but switched their preference to other new media types, such as live streaming. This points to an underestimated obstacle in media innovation (García-Avilés et al., 2019): for expensive products the “experimental spirit” may lie outside of the media organizations that want to implement the innovation.

Instead of relying solely on the tech giants, many professionals have also explored possibilities to sustain their IJ production, mainly on two levels. Firstly, on the media level, IJ was regarded more as a business strategy than as an advance in news presentation. A Turkish journalist mentioned that their news outlet was in a commercial model transformation, switching from a low-cost newspaper to a more expensive subscription service when they piloted IJ. The outlet chose IJ to set an image of innovativeness, exclusiveness, and quality to attract higher end paying audiences. This is also a case where IJ is used for the novelty instead of its potentials. Similarly, in a Chinese online media company, immersive news video was introduced to ‘seize an early opportunity’ to outcompete other media. Secondly, discussing on a project level, professionals found it difficult for an IJ project to sustain itself. The low number of audiences, costly production, and immature technology were widely cited as reasons. According to a media professional involved in the Guardian’s IJ project, ‘by the end of the 3 years, they (the Guardian’s IJ team) felt that they had explored what the commercial possibilities was, both in terms of technical partners and commercial businesses. And that it was kind of too hard to fund what is currently quite an expensive mode of production.’

As the immersive visual technology is still developing and far from being popularised, it also challenged media professionals in the IJ application. We have discussed how the strength of IJ is understood differently among IJ users. In our interviews, we also found conflicting ideas of an ideal development trajectory for IJ. For some, smaller, low-cost productions should be used to prioritise speedy delivery and easy access to IJ. This, however, might lead to a less satisfying user experience and be perceived as unworthy (see Vindenes and Gynnild, 2021). Another route is to prioritise the quality of the production, delivering more interactive and enjoyable immersive experiences. While well received, this type of production usually proves to be expensive and unsustainable. Seeing the adoption of IJ as a diffusion of media innovation, the differential use cases and the dilemma of big vs small productions describe the matching stage in the organisational innovation process. In this stage, the innovation is matched with the anticipated benefit or the need of the organisation, and a perceived mismatch here could risk stagnating the implementation of the innovation (Rogers, 2003: 423-424). The relative advantage, in this case the advantage of IJ compared with traditional media forms, is also an attribute that influences the adoption of the innovation (Rogers, 2003). In their study of newsroom innovations, García-Avilés et al. (2019) identified both the growth of audiences and the users’ satisfaction regarding the change, among others, as news media’s expected outcome in innovations. The fact that adopters see IJ’s advantages differently, and that some beneficiary expectations are undecided, could have led to difficulties in the adoption of IJ.

Decision making in media innovation

Innovation champions, pioneers, and early adopters

We further asked interviewees about the decision-making process to adopt IJ across different roles within the media. From our interviews, we see that media innovations like IJ do not happen simultaneously among all members of the media, but one person or a small group of people take the lead. Although IJ productions usually involve more people, it was quite clear that the IJ projects in news media generally started when one key user started to work on IJ. These key users then became forces of promoting the adoption of IJ in their organization. It is important to notice that these key users do not necessarily hold higher positions in news media or have more power in their jobs, rather, they all have strong ability to influence their colleagues, from journalists to the management. In larger media companies that have research and development (R&D) departments, some full-time innovators became IJ key users. The key users lobbied for support from upper management and communicated within their colleagues so that people in different roles work together to realise IJ. The former leader of the BBC’s IJ projects recalled convincing the management to start VR experiments: ‘… I was working with a BBC strategist to write a report on what should be done, and write a paper that went to the top, to the director general of the BBC to say this is what we should do. So, it was a strategy paper that then led to the setting up of the VR hub.’ Besides lobbying for support from higher management, the key user of IJ in Euronews also provided training for colleagues to start creating immersive news product: ‘If someone goes to shoot (news video) and you give them an extra task to do (filming immersive content). And then you have to train them, and you try to pay them more for their work. But it's never as much as they hoped. So, there was constant negotiation (to get colleagues aboard IJ).’

In organisational innovation, the role of an innovation champion can be vital (Rogers, 2003). According to Rogers (2003: 414), ‘a champion is a charismatic individual who throws his or her weight behind an innovation, thus overcoming indifference or resistance that the new idea may provoke in an organisation’. Such characteristics and behaviours could be evidently seen in the IJ key users in our interviews. An innovation champion does not need to be someone powerful, but needs to be ‘adept at handling people, an individual skilful in persuasion and negotiation’ (Rogers, 2003: 415). Thus, a champion’s effort in innovation adoption takes the advantage of their influential character in the workplace, such as personal charisma or deeper connection with colleagues, but not in an authoritarian or superior way. This explains why key users of IJ in this study hold different positions in media, from journalists to higher-up managers, including people with relatively little authority over their colleagues.

In the promotion of IJ among news media, several innovative pioneers and early adopters also played crucial roles. Discussion in both academia and industry see filmmaker and journalist Nonny de la Peña as the person who coined IJ (Baía Reis and Coelho, 2018). She and her earlier IJ works were widely mentioned as interviewees’ introduction to IJ. Many interviewees were also inspired by her online and public appearances when they decided to relate their work with IJ. For example, a media staff in charge of innovation activities from the US mentioned de la Peña’s Ted talk as his IJ starting point. In the words of a media innovation experimenter from the UK: ‘people like Nonny de la Peña really drove it. She went to lots of news conferences. Journalists get excited by new things and new ways to tell stories.’ Interviewees also cited innovation conventions and events showcasing immersive media, such as South by Southwest interactive film festival, as their IJ initiation. Subsequently, earlier adopters of IJ in news media also worked on promoting the use of IJ. Some interviewees developed tools for IJ creation, and some provided training for other journalists to adopt IJ, such as the aforementioned case at Euronews. An early IJ adopter formerly working at Yahoo News has produced a video tutorial offering a low-cost onboarding solution for smaller media to start using IJ affordably.

Such activities showcased the crucial role the pioneers and early users play in the adoption of IJ. Rogers’ (2003: 282–285) diffusion of innovations theory provided a categorisation of five types of adopters, namely — in descending order of innovativeness — innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Since IJ is still at an early age and has not been completely adopted yet, the five ideal types of adopters cannot be exhaustively applied in this case. However, according to the roles they play in the adoption of IJ we suggest that most current and previous IJ users fit into Rogers’ categories of innovators and early adopters (see also García-Avilés et al., 2019). People like Nonny de la Peña acted as innovators and launched the idea by importing an outside innovation into journalism. Most of our interviewees who have used IJ took the role of early adopters who further validated the innovation and provided information about IJ to their peers. This emphasises the importance of earlier adopters in the diffusion process of innovations.

Innovation strategies in news media

Although innovation champions and key users do not have to be someone in management positions, our interviews did show the importance of leadership in the adoption of IJ. As was mentioned in the case at the BBC, one of the first activities of the IJ key user was to convince the top management to start exploring IJ. In another scenario, the interest in IJ started from a person in management at Yahoo News. The leader then recruited a team including an IJ key user to make it happen. Enthusiasm and support from the media’s leadership was evidently crucial to an innovation. Subsequently, Yahoo’s IJ project was halted after some changes in the ownership and management where the new leader had a different vision with regards to innovation and IJ. The alteration of management and internal politics has been cited by various interviewees as the direct cause of aborted IJ projects.

In news media, IJ not only faced uncertainty from the leadership, but also met competition from innovation projects of other technologies. While the hype over VR cooled off, there were new trends in news media innovation, such as the use of big data and artificial intelligence (AI). Some interviewees reported their media’s interest turning away from IJ to other innovations. Innovations that were still in the exploration phase, such as IJ, were further challenged by readily usable new technologies. At the BBC, an interviewee saw their IJ project coming to a stop as the company put more effort into other new technologies, for example, updating their streaming services. Unfortunately for IJ, there were other off-the-shelf new technologies that were considered more realistic and more urgently needing to be adopted. When different innovations are compared, Rogers’ (2003) DOI theory identified five characteristics of innovations that are positively related to the rate of adoption: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. Scholars have also developed newer models to address innovations’ characteristics, such as perceived ease of use and perceived utility in the technology acceptance model, and the uses and gratifications model (see Atkin et al., 2015). Based upon our interviews, it seems that IJ got out-competed by other innovations mostly because of the complexity in use and implementation. But this is a tentative result in need of more research, since not all interviewees felt capable of comparing IJ with other innovations.

In the development of IJ, technological advances served as an important actant, as is increasingly the case in journalistic innovations (García-Avilés et al., 2019). Media professionals discussed media’s relationship with the technologies in their IJ attempts. Many interviewees describe media innovation as succedent to technological advancement. For many, it would be beneficial to weigh what advanced technology brings and decide what new technology they want to use. A person conducting innovation experiments in a media company with expertise in various media types in the UK described their innovation aim as ‘looking at trends for audiences as well as what different technology is bringing.’ Nevertheless, the media did not only take a passive position in the technological development. For example, Hürriyet from Türkiye, the Guardian, and the New York Times have all distributed free Cardboard devices with their newspaper. The discontinued Cardboard was a low-cost device made from paper cardboard that helped users view 360-degree videos with their smartphones. This showed news media’s initiative to push technology forward. Immersive technology enables a new kind of visual presentation. In our interviews, media professionals were clear that the aim of IJ should not be to replace other types of media, just like TV never replaced radio.

Media professionals who continued working on IJ suggested that news media should manage their expectations in innovation experiments. From a media innovation experimenter in the UK:

It might not be the right time for mass take-up, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing those experiments. I think that having labs and R&D (research and development) units is a really great idea. I love the kind of BBC’s and the New York Times’ model of having just spaces for experimentation and not expecting each experiment to be a new product and a new outward audience-facing commercial product. I think it’s really important.

Many interviewees concurred with the benefit of dedicated R&D missions in news media. Also, according to them, having some room for mistakes is a key part of being innovative. There has been a sense of risk-averseness and a lack of experimentation mentality in newsroom culture (Paulussen, 2016). To some IJ key users from the US, the aim of exploring IJ was to keep the media ready for when immersive media becomes the new future. And to a French journalist, learning from the IJ experiments to ‘do it right’ was more valuable than popularising. Either way, the notion of managing expectations in media innovation attempts was highlighted by most of the interviewed media professionals.

Conclusion

Immersive Journalism (IJ) is one of the most significant yet not fully blossomed innovations in the journalistic field in the past decade. This study examined how IJ was adopted and sometimes discontinued by media organizations through the lens of the diffusion of innovations theory (García-Avilés et al., 2019; Rogers, 2003). Drawing on interviews with media professionals and their experiences with IJ the study sought to paint a clearer picture of the turbulent IJ development and contribute to the understanding of news media innovation in a modern, digitalised context.

The study disclosed the various enablers and disablers of IJ’s adoption (RQ1). Interviewees saw IJ’s potentials in strengthening the news storytelling but were inconsistent in the type of dominant advantages they associated with IJ. Journalists seek the ‘storytelling power’ of immersive media that facilitates the task of storytelling in their work (Cheng and Verboord, 2024; Sirkkunen et al., 2021). The newsroom culture of being the forerunner, and subsequently the peer pressure of fearing to lag also made the novelty of IJ attractive to news media. On the downside, media professionals found it hard for IJ projects to self-sustain due to the lower number of recipients and the experimental nature of innovative projects. Rather, many media only used IJ projects as a tactic to increase their perceived quality and advance. The current deficiencies in the technology have also caused divergence in the development of IJ. This further jeopardised the diffusion of IJ.

Studying the mechanism behind the decision making in news media’s IJ adoption (RQ2), this study highlighted the agency of three groups of people in the diffusion and adoption of IJ. First and foremost, key users of IJ played an important role in their news media’s IJ projects. They coordinated the innovation adoption, liaised among colleagues and management, troubleshot difficulties, and made sure that IJ could happen in their news media. They do not necessarily have authority or hold managing positions in news media but must be able to influence all co-workers involved in IJ adoption. Here, key users match Rogers’ (2003) concept of innovation champions in organisations. Second, early adopters and pioneers of IJ, such as Nonny de la Peña, evidently inspired and effectively advocated for IJ usage among news professionals. Third, media managers and the leadership still had a strong influence on innovation decisions, suggesting the presence of organisational authority hierarchies in media innovation. The value of innovation champions and early adopters was emphasised in the DOI theory (Rogers, 2003). Although media innovation is a collective action, this suggests that a smaller group of people had much more significance in this process.

This study advances the theoretical understanding of news media innovation in at least two directions. First, it demonstrates the integration of newsroom culture in news media’s innovation activities. Second, it offers a multidimensional perspective on news media innovation to account for the complexity of other innovations, actors, organisational and technological changes.

Technological affordances and perceived advantages have received much academic discussion as incentives for media to adopt an innovation. This study provided evidence that the newsroom culture also plays a significant role in incentivising innovations and in the selection of different innovations (García-Avilés et al., 2018). The external incentives to the adoption of IJ unveiled in this study were particular to journalistic innovation. There has been a newsroom culture of (seemingly) fore-running and peer pressure among news media incentivising innovations such as IJ. The culture of ‘being first’ in news media has been widely discussed in journalism education and the industry (e.g., Roberts, 2016). From our interviews we see this competitiveness overflowing from news stories to the presentation and innovation. This subsequently incentivises news media to innovate to attract the audiences, as news media seen as leaders in innovation are in turn perceived as higher-quality and worthy. Regarding innovations’ connection to news media’s culture and norms, Porcu (2020) conceptualised innovative learning culture (ILC) as a kind of newsroom culture that is relevant to media innovation, which is predominantly shaped by the journalists’ perception of job security and willingness to take risks (Porcu et al., 2022). Paulussen (2016) utilised the sociological concept of ‘normalisation’ to understand newsroom technology adoption as normalising new practice into existing norms and routines. While these already demonstrated the significance of the internal professional culture in newsroom innovation, our study points further to the culture formed externally among various news media and curated by the nature of journalism profession in the current media environment. It would be useful for further research to take a closer look at such culture in journalism and its influence on media innovation. In the meantime, we also notice that how IJ interacts with the journalistic norms internally in newsrooms was not excessively mentioned by our interviewees. This could be due to the superficial use of IJ in many cases. Future study could also contribute to the current discussion of the challenges to journalistic norms that IJ entails (Kick et al., 2023).

Media innovation is formerly often discussed as a stand-alone linear process that leads to either failure or successful adoption. From the findings in this study, we propose to put media innovation in a multidimensional perspective, taking into consideration multiple other innovations and technologies, internal and external actors, and organisational culture and changes. García-Avilés et al.’s (2019) model of diffusion of media innovation outlined a set of factors shaping the processes and outcomes of the innovation adoption in news media, including the resources, leadership, and innovativeness in news media. Our research confirmed these factors, while making also additions. We signal two specific obstacles for technology-based innovations in the media industries not often highlighted: increasing dependence on the tech giants for development (see also Pavlik, 2021: 101–103); and competition from other technologies that are being developed to solve the similar identified problems (García-Avilés et al., 2018; Meier et al., 2024). While the collaboration between news media and the tech giants appeared to be equal and productive at first, the post-hype period revealed tech giants’ uneven advantage not only in technology and capital, but also increasingly through platformisation and algorithm supremacy. Across different innovations, IJ was challenged by other similar innovation trends, and by other successful and mature changes that needed to be implemented more urgently. From the case of IJ, we see that news media have also put in effort to gain more agency in technological changes in media, although with limited success. As we see media innovation as a process of identifying and fulfilling needs while adding value to customers and media (García-Avilés et al., 2018), our findings highlight the broader environment where this process happens, including the timing, resource, and competition.

Some remarks need to be made. First, IJ is one of multiple ways through which news media industries try to adapt to disruptions (see Pavlik, 2021). While changes in storytelling formats concern a key element of many organizations to adapt, these often are not disjunct from other elements at the meso or macrolevel. Second, newer technologies and concepts, such as the metaverse, mixed-reality, and Web 3.0, imply that the concept of immersive storytelling is evolving. Particularly the role of AI technologies in news production and distribution – including immersive media workflows – is rapidly growing (Meier et al., 2024: 270ff).

This study could not be exempt from limitations. Despite the importance of the role of audiences in media innovation (e.g., Westlund and Lewis, 2014), and IJ in particular (Greber et al., 2023), our interviews with experts did not generate much insight into their relative importance. Furthermore, our sample focused on those with relatively extensive experience with IJ. This implies that persons who were sceptical and/or who struggled with the technology were therefore not represented in this research. The interviewees did not often mention shortcomings of the technology despite earlier studies of journalists reporting on struggles (e.g., Goutier et al., 2021; Wu, 2022). Therefore, although this study has put much effort into addressing the challenges and the stagnated development of post-hype IJ, a level of pro-innovation bias persisted. As identified by Rogers (2003: 106), the pro-innovation bias is to assume that an innovation ought to be adopted by all members of a social system. Future research efforts could dedicate more effort to understand the rejected cases of IJ adoption, and more information about the preferences in media innovation, the selection process, and rejected media innovations could be expected.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - The diffusion of immersive journalism as media innovation from media professionals’ perspectives

Supplemental Material for The diffusion of immersive journalism as media innovation from media professionals’ perspectives by Kaixin Cheng, Marc Verboord in Journalism