Dateline Parkland: Transmedia News and Student Activism from an American Mass Shooting
Danielle Behrens
Media, and technology are ever evolving, and storytelling and journalism are not exceptions to the effects of these constant changes. Among them is the evolution of journalism into a transmedia phenomenon. No longer passive a consumer of news, the public assembles knowledge of news events from multiple sources and perspectives, shares it, and acts on it in ways not seen in the analog age.
This study evaluates a sample of the news stories published following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School in Parkland, Florida, as a snapshot of the wider coverage of the event. Henry Jenkins’ seven principles of transmedia storytelling served as the lens of analysis for looking at the MSD shooting content. This study demonstrates that, despite any form of centralized planning, coverage of the shooting matched the definition of transmedia storytelling.
There is a lack of studies that analyze stories that were not pre-planned to be transmedia. All of the current studies that analyze transmedia journalism simply look at projects that were designed as transmedia narratives from the start . This thesis explores transmedia storytelling in relation to unplanned journalism to begin filling the research gap.
This research seeks to discover how well Henry Jenkins’ seven principles of transmedia storytelling apply to an important breaking news story. This study provides insights on the role a spontaneous transmedia story plays within journalism and explores transmedia storytelling principles that might help fuel civic engagement and activism.
Henry Jenkins' seven principles of transmedia storytelling are Spreadability vs. Drillability, Continuity vs. Multiplicity, Immersion vs. Extractability, Worldbuilding, Seriality, Subjectivity, and Performance.
This case study examines a sample of the news stories published following the MSD shooting. To evaluate the transmedia nature of these stories as an example of the wider coverage of the event, Henry Jenkins’ seven principles of transmedia storytelling will serve as my lens of analysis for looking at the MSD shooting content.
This study then uses Jenkins’ seven principles from a journalistic perspective as the coding categories for a directed qualitative analysis to examine the set of news stories. Transmedia storytelling is often associated with entertainment narratives, such as movies, books, and YouTube series.
Henry Jenkins defines the term as, “…a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.”
A transmedia narrative unfolds across multiple media platforms with each piece adding value to the whole. Unlike earlier work in transmedia storytelling, this event and movement was not initially meant to be transmediated. Rather, the MSD shooting is a “feral” transmedia story. Feral transmedia stories are not orchestrated from the beginning with someone planning out the various events and twists and turns of the narrative, but rather they emerge from the readers’ organic interactions with stories that illustrate additive pieces of the storyworld. Despite the lack of planning and direction, these stories form a transmedia narrative.
There is much to be discovered by examining how transmedia storytelling can be implemented into the coverage of an important news event. When the issue is told as a multiplatform story, people have the opportunity to connect and get involved through an array of accessible platforms. When people get more involved in a story, they are more likely to want to do something about it.
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