Today, the relationship between the creators of media content and the audience comes to the fore and attracts the attention of both industry professionals and media researchers who identify the patterns of functioning of modern media environment.
The article discusses immersion as a way to engage the audience, which is used today by the creators of media content. Technological transformation, which affects almost all spheres of human existence, creates new opportunities for creating content and interacting with it.
The goal is to explore new media formats, such as VR, as well as innovative storytelling methods and storytelling structures that this format uses. Mastering the laws of storytelling, which is at the heart of the construction of media texts and is designed to capture the imagination, release emotions, is an actual trend of modern journalism.
Immersive journalism that uses virtual reality technologies expands the visual narrative.
This publication discusses the trend for narrativization and visualization of media content. Professional construction of narratives becomes the most important function of modern journalism. Special attention is paid to changes in media content consumption and production technologies.
The paper proves the position that immersive storytelling belongs to the involving paradigm and involves interaction with the audience, which in turn is a form of struggle for the audience's attention. Audience participation in the narrative is a form of participatory journalism that is becoming more relevant.
The problem of interaction with the audience is more relevant than ever for journalism. Interactivity presupposes communication as a form of modern journalism: the most successful forms of it are being searched for and implemented, one of which is 'storified communication'. In general, virtual reality, as a technological platform and experimental laboratory for experiments with narrative, can change the existing cultural paradigm.
The language of virtual reality has not yet been developed and continues to be formed thanks to practicals, many of which are journalists whose task is to make projects that attract the attention of the audience. Nevertheless, these projects manage to create a situation of dialogue, which is an important means of communication.
Thus, immersive storytelling, which uses a dialogic form of communication to attract the attention of the audience and make it an active participant in the interaction, activates one of the most productive and creative forms of interaction between the media and the audience.