[Commlist] cfp: Immersive Journalism: Virtual Worlds and the Future of the News Industry

*Call for Chapters*

(/Proposed title:/) Immersive Journalism: Virtual Worlds and the Future 
of the News Industry

(/Published by Lexington Books, August 2023/)**

*Edited by Tomás Dodds (Leiden University)*

*Deadline for proposals: December 30^th *

VR, AR, and 360 videos are storytelling tools that require journalists 
to navigate new narratives and platforms. Immersive technologies can 
amplify feelings of presence for the audience, allowing for deeper 
emotional engagement and information recall. Therefore, immersive 
technologies present unique ethical and practical questions for 
journalism, as its production is linked to biometrical, sensory, and 
metadata collection. Consequently, conversations about future-proofing 
newsrooms for the metaverse have gained increasing academic and societal 
attention over the last few years. This edited book is one of the first 
to ask: How do immersive technologies affect newsmaking, and what impact 
do they have on journalistic norms, audience engagement, and data 
protection?

This volume will be divided into three sections. The first section looks 
at how the empathy-generating nature of 360-degree videos impacts 
journalists producing the news and which ethical norms and values media 
workers consider when making the news. The second section of this book 
delves deeper into platform infrastructures and the narratives allowed 
by their affordances. This book's third and final section explores how 
new users’ data is made available to journalists through these 
technologies and presents the ethical and regulatory challenges 
associated with this recent phenomenon.

·Content Production & Journalistic Cultures: This book's first section 
addresses how journalists use new platforms to create novel types of 
content. Immersive technologies allow the users to gain first-person 
experiences of the events presented by journalists, which radically 
transforms the reporters' role in constructing news narratives. This 
section describes how VR technologies are transforming working cultures 
within newsrooms, including the diversification of professional roles 
and the upgrade in the materiality required to produce 360-degree and VR 
content. Possible questions for this section include: (1) how newsrooms 
are adapting their infrastructure to produce VR content, (2) how 
journalists are navigating professional and ethical questions 
surrounding the production of immersive content, and (3) reporters' 
imaginaries about the future of the news industry across the world.

·Narratives & Platforms Infrastructures: Virtual reality has shown 
promising results in recent studies on information recall and emotional 
engagement. Unlike two-dimensional (2D) videos, immersive 360-degree 
videos using a VR headset impact the audience differently, even when the 
based content is similar between the two formats. This makes the role 
that third-party platforms play in constructing virtual worlds even more 
critical as journalists adapt to the affordances of these platforms to 
build the news. As journalists look for spaces in the metaverse, new 
processes of gathering, processing, and designing information emerge 
across newsrooms. Possible questions for this section include: (1) 
platforms' affordances and their impact on news production, (2) VR 
languages and platform narratives for the creation of immersive content, 
and (3) how immersive technologies could increase the dependency between 
newsrooms and third-party platforms like Facebook and Google in 
different countries.

·Audiences Metrics & Data Protection: The material design of virtual and 
augmented reality technologies allows platforms and third-party 
companies to collect, analyze and distribute unquantifiable amounts of 
individual user data. VR headsets, some of which include brainwave 
sensors and eye-tracking technologies, allow the collection of three 
distinct categories of data to create virtual worlds. Firstly, physical 
data, such as body motion or visual attention-cueing, is collected 
through new generations of headsets or hand-based inputs. Secondly, 
biometrical data is collected through sensors that measure and record 
voluntary and involuntary bodily signals. Thirdly, metadata is naturally 
also recorded by platforms in the metaverse. Everything becomes data 
points for media to better understand their users, from avatars to 
microtransactions to friends and interactions. Possible questions for 
this section include: (1) what type of ethical considerations 
journalists have when dealing with user data, (2) how journalists are 
using new types of data to construct news stories, and (3) how these new 
categories of data impact the construction of media’s agenda.

*Please email chapter proposals of up to 500 words in length, as well as 
a brief author biographical information (150 words) to Tomás Dodds 
((t.dodds.rojas /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl) 
<mailto:(t.dodds.rojas /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl)>) – no later than Friday, 
December 30^th . Please indicate for which section you are proposing 
your chapter.

*Notification of acceptance will be sent in January 2023.

*After feedback, complete chapters (6000-7000 words) are due on April 
24^th for editing. The book is expected to be published as a hardcover 
edition in August 2023.

A contract has been signed with Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield 
Publishing Group). No payment from the authors will be required.

Editor: Tomás Dodds is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and New 
Media at Leiden University and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein 
Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He is also a 
researcher in the AI, Media & Democracy Lab in the Netherlands and the 
Artificial Intelligence and Society Hub [IA+SIC] in Chile.

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