Open and commercial tools to generate a digital interactive story in journalism: systematic review and features analysis

ABSTRACT

The constant technological advances are transferred to the area of journalism with significant contributions to the production of innovative formats adapted to the multimedia, interactive and multiplatform scenario. Since interactive narrative journalism is one of the trends of digital journalism, it is necessary to approach the offer of services that facilitate the journalistic creation of dynamic and interactive journalistic contents. The main objective is to analyze web programs and applications for the creation and publication of interactive digital narratives. Based on the PRISMA systematic review methodology, a total of 15 programs and web applications were identified after reading 28 articles and examination of 54 webpages with value in interactive digital journalism. Five are open-source applications, which invite the community to continue developing improvements that make these tools innovative and adaptable to future changes. Our study reveals the highly valued functionalities, such as the capacity for data analysis and teamwork, among others that allow the integration of 360° multimedia, the management of the interaction map, the preview in different output formats, such as tablet or mobile. However, there is a lack of journalistic roles in these tools that let them coordinate and optimise the publication process to produce the final news.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital storytelling
• interactive storytelling
• interactive communication
• technology
• tools
• digital journalism

Acknowledgements

This article has been prepared within the framework of the project Digital-native media in Spain: Strategies, competencies, social involvement and (re)definition of practices in journalistic production and diffusion (PID2021-122534OB-C21), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Spanish State Research Agency and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The author Iván Otero-González is a beneficiary of predoctoral contracts for the training of doctors (PRE2019-087367).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Spanish State Research Agency and the European Regional Development Fund.