648093

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JOU0010.1177/1464884916648093JournalismSong

Article

Journalism

Multimedia news storytelling as

2018, Vol. 19(6) 837­–859
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1464884916648093
https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916648093
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education

Yang Song
Fudan University, China

Abstract
This article analyzes a journalism student’s multimedia news storytelling project in the
format of audio slideshows as required by an introductory course on online journalism.
Combining classroom ethnography, semi-structured interviews, content and textual
analysis, the study focuses in detail on how the student designs a character-driven,
audio-visual story through the theoretical lens of digital literacies and multimodality. The
findings reveal the complexity of multimodal and generic design made by the journalism
student. It is also found that the design process helps her to assert an authorial stance as
an emergent online journalist who negotiates heterogeneity of journalistic professional
Discourses. This article proposes a genre-aware, semiotic-aware, critical framework
informed by digital literacy studies and embeds a case study in the theoretical framework
in order to understand the ‘literacies’ as required and performed in multimedia news
storytelling. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are also discussed at the end of
the article.

Keywords
Audio slideshows, genre-awareness, multimedia news storytelling, multimodality,
online journalism education, semiotic awareness

Introduction
Technology has brought along constant evolution to journalism (Pavlik, 2001). With the
emergence of online journalism in the 1990s, online news practices challenge the
occupational jurisdiction of journalism with a multiplicity of conflicting and competing

Corresponding author:
Yang Song, Department of English Language and Literature, College of Foreign Languages and Literatures,
Fudan University, 323, Humanities Building, 220 Handan Road, Yangpu District, 200433 Shanghai, China.
Email: songyang@fudan.edu.cn
838 Journalism 19(6)

journalistic ideals, including objectivity (Schudson, 2003; Tuchman, 1978), transpar-

ency (Karlsson, 2010), and participation (Hajunen, 2013; Lewis, 2012). The new tools of
news production and presentation afforded by the new media have inevitably brought
along negotiations of journalistic rules, norms, or values in news institutions as well as
genres of news storytelling defined by specific platforms and formats.
Along with the transformation of journalism practices comes the re-configuration of
journalism education. In order to prepare journalism students to live up to the demands
of online journalism today, journalism schools have developed courses that emphasize
journalistic practice on online news platforms and tools. The majority of existing studies
on online journalism education have adopted a skill-based paradigm,1 which regards the
central task of online journalism education as equipping journalism students with neces-
sary skills in order to be ‘work-ready’ (Becker et al., 2011; Blom and Davenport, 2012;
Deuze, 1999; Fahmy, 2008). These skills include (1) technological skills of operating
online tools, software, and platforms, such as SoundSlides Plus, WordPress.com, and
Twitter; (2) traditional journalism skills or duties of sourcing, verification, text-based
reporting, and editing; and (3) news packaging skills in relation to newly emerged for-
mats, such as audio slideshows (photo slideshows with audio), animated information
graphics, news tweets, and live streaming (Wenger et al., 2014).
Admitting the importance of online skill training, some journalism educators also call
for incorporation of conceptual and critical issues on journalism profession in online
journalism curricula (Blom and Davenport, 2012; Du, 2014; Du and Lo, 2014). Recent
studies have proposed a variety of pedagogical methods in order to foster critical think-
ing in the inherent context of online news reporting (Bor, 2014; Cochrane et al., 2012;
Woolley, 2014). Meanwhile, a few studies (Hart, 2011; Lipschultz, 2012) highlighted
that storytelling, the essential craft of journalism, needs to be prioritized in online jour-
nalism courses.
The afore-reviewed literature has emphasized one or more of the three major aspects
in designing and teaching online journalism courses, including technological and news
packaging skills, critical thinking, and news storytelling. However, it remains a chal-
lenge to discern the relationship among those aspects of online journalism practices in
both research and pedagogy. More important, what is lacking is an understanding of how
online journalistic products are created from the perspective of the creators as well as its
potential implications for online journalism education and journalism education in gen-
eral. Therefore, this article proposes a genre-aware, semiotic-aware, critical framework
informed by digital literacy studies and embeds a case study in the theoretical framework
in order to understand the ‘literacies’ that are required for multimedia news storytelling.
The notion of digital literacies is defined as the ‘the practices of communicating,
relating and “being” associated with digital media’ (Jones and Hafner, 2012). It is built
upon two inter-related traditions of literacy studies – New Literacy Studies (NLS) and
Multiliteracies Studies. NLS adopt a sociocultural approach to literacy studies (Barton
and Hamilton, 1998; Gee, [1990] 2012; Lankshear and Knobel, 2011). The ‘newness’ of
the NLS lies in three aspects. First, New Literacy researchers regard literacy as social
practice or practice embedded in social and cultural contexts. Gee ([1990] 2012: 3)
argues that literacy is always situated in Discourses. Discourses refer to ‘ways of behav-
ing, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing,
Song 839

that are accepted as instantiations of particular identities (or ‘kinds of people’) by spe-
cific groups’. Any literacy practice by an individual simultaneously enacts an identity
affiliated to one or more Discourses, whether in harmony or in tension. Second, NLS
emphasize the critical awareness of the discourse community members toward their own
literacy practice, their beliefs, and values, as well as institutional codes of conduct that
have been internalized and recognized by these members. It requires learners being
socialized in any kind of literacy practice to not only achieve mastery in performance but
to learn meta-knowledge about (1) the Discourse(s) that they subscribe to and (2) how
the Discourses come into being historically and evolve under specific social and cultural
contexts, and to learn a meta-language to articulate and to share their understandings
about the meta-knowledge so as to make possibilities of revising the Discourses together
with the underlying power relations (Gee, 2014). The cultivation of meta-knowledge and
a meta-language makes new literacies inherently akin with critical literacy and critical
pedagogy (Gee, 2014). Third, NLS have led a ‘digital’ turn in literacy research by empha-
sizing how digital technologies drive changes in literacy practice (Mills, 2010).
Ethnographic studies have revealed innovative use of digital technologies among chil-
dren both in school and at home (Gilje, 2010; Vasudevan et al., 2010). Their attention to
the juxtaposition of multiple types of semiotic resources (written and spoken texts,
images, sounds, voices, etc.) overlaps with the tradition of multiliteracies studies (New
London Group, 1996).
New London Group (1996) argues that the textual literacy is increasingly integrated
with other modes of meaning making, including ‘the visual, the audio, the spatial, the
behavioral, and so on’ (Cazden et al., 1996: 64). Apart from linguistic meaning, five
other equally important elements, including ‘visual meaning, audio meaning, gestural
meaning, spatial meaning, and the multimodal patterns of meaning that relates to the first
five modes of meaning to each other’ (Cazden et al., 1996: 65), are incorporated into the
making of meaning (or design). Multiliteracies researchers (Kress, 2003, 2010; Kress
and Van Leeuwen, 1996; Van Leeuwen, 2005) have also contributed substantially to the
development of multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), which provides the meta-lan-
guage for both ethnographic and textual studies in both traditions of literacy studies
reviewed above.
Grounded on the paradigmatic underpinnings of digital literacy studies, online jour-
nalists can be regarded as a discourse community that shares an increasingly diverse
multiplicity of journalistic Discourses and codes of conducts, especially those related to
what is news and what are news values. Online journalism classrooms are in turn ‘sites
where students and teachers undertake matter/energy/symbolic exchanges as part of the
work of producing discourse and cultural capital’ (Luke, 1995: 3). Students are supposed
to be critically socialized into literacy practice required for ‘designing’ multimedia news
storytelling embedded in online journalism culture globally and locally. Design refers to
how students explore the journalistic storytelling potentials of multimedia, when com-
pleting the audio slideshow assignment. The design stance is rooted in traditional MDA
but also in the functional methodology that ‘treats the film [audio slideshow in the case]
as designed to elicit certain sorts of effects’, and that assumes that ‘the text is so made
that it seeks certain intersubjective regularities of response’ (Bordwell, 2004: 211). This
article will describe and analyze a journalism student’s multimodal design experience as
840 Journalism 19(6)

Figure 1.  A model of digital literacies for online journalism.

both process and product so as to illustrate digital literacy practice involved in learning
multimedia news storytelling and her identity formation as an online journalist-to-be.
Before delving into the case study, the next section will introduce the theoretical frame-
work informed by digital literacy studies.

Theoretical framework
The present section proposes a unitary, multi-layered framework. Methodologically, the
framework aims to facilitate the description and analysis of digital literacies involved in
online journalism practice. The framework defines digital literacies as both meaning-
making potentials and multi-semiotic instantiation enacted and reflected upon by online
journalism students in specific cultural and social contexts for specific purposes. It
simultaneously encompasses dimensions of professional culture, professional practices,
and abstraction of instantiated meaning making via multimodal semiotic resources (see
Figure 1).
Figure 1 illustrates a genre-aware, semiotic-aware, critical framework that aims at
analyzing digital literacies required and practiced by online journalists. The largest circle
represents the dimension of professional journalistic Discourses. Based on Gee ([1990]
2012), the Discourses are social constructs, which are produced, reproduced, circulated,
and transformed by online journalists as situated within a journalistic institutional culture
and the overall culture of online mass communication. Journalism Discourses are
‘weaved’ together to mark the emergence of new Discourses of online journalism.
Journalistic schools are by no means an insulated space independent from the sociocul-
tural context but rather ‘a modern state institution in which the regulation of activity and
knowledge construction are seen as crucial for the process of sociocultural reproduction’
(Pérez-Milans, 2011: 1007). Instead of imposing a particular kind of journalistic
Discourse on the students, online journalism courses should, from the perspective of
New Literacies, take a critical stance by drawing students’ attention to existing Discourses
and how they construct their authorial stances or discourse identities by subscribing to
Song 841

specific journalistic Discourses in specific contexts of multimedia news production

(Vasudevan et al., 2010).
The second layer in the diagram is the multimedia logic,2 which is aimed at analyzing
online journalism practices of news production and formatting in relation to the media-
tion of technological materiality, such as software and devices. Closely associated with
the analysis of journalistic Discourses, analysis of the multimedia logic focuses on how
technologies could be understood as cultural artifacts and how they shape the processes
and formats of news production and presentation.
The dimension of online news genres is the intermediary dimension in the analytical
framework. In this study, the notion of genre is developed on the basis of the Sydney
School tradition of genre analysis. Derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL),
the Sydney School of genre analysis regards language as social semiotic resources and
defines genres in terms of specific linguistic patterns that help identify the generic struc-
ture shared by a group of texts.
In the inner circle, the instantiations of online news genres will be analyzed in terms of
scalar levels defined by both the visual, audio, textual, and graphic semiotic potentials and
their potentials of meaning making according to the MDA framework (Baldry and
Thibault, 2006; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996; Van Leeuwen, 2005), especially the trans-
modal cohesion strategies in the case of visual-aural storytelling. Abiding by the SFL
approach, this framework will enable us to understand how meaning is created within
online journalistic products (ideational meta-function), to comprehend how the creator
forms relationships with an audience (interpersonal meta-function) and how text is gener-
ated and organized meaningfully in a specific social situation (textual meta-function).
In addition, this framework associates multiple dimensions of online journalism prac-
tices with two major aspects of digital literacies derived from two theoretical traditions
of literacy studies – critical literacies and multi-semiotic literacies (as illustrated in the
text box at the center of Figure 1). A double-arrowed curve links the two aspects of digi-
tal literacies with each other in order to show the dialectic relationship between them.
For one thing, critical literacies are embodied and enacted in concrete acts of news sto-
rytelling rather than understood as abstract, ideological underpinnings. For the other,
multi-semiotic literacies are situated social practices, through which (student) journalists
perform their professional identities in the process of telling specific news stories.
By analyzing online journalism practice on the basis of the theoretical framework, we
are able to more fully understand the interdependent and mutually shaping relationships
that contribute to the online journalistic product and to view it within a context of digital
literacies. It is hypothesized that the lack of construction of certain dimensions within the
framework will pose challenges for students’ learning of digital literacies required for a
professional online journalist. In the sense, the framework also aims at linking the edu-
cational and the demands of professionalization of online journalists. The next section
will introduce the research context and methods of the present study.

Research context and methods

The study took place in an introductory course on online journalism in a tertiary institu-
tion in Hong Kong. The course is a compulsory core course for students enrolled in a
842 Journalism 19(6)

3-year program of Bachelor of Journalism. The course consists of 12 sessions, 3 hours

each. A total of twelve 3-hour-long classroom observations were conducted in a class-
room equipped with project screen and computers for each student and the instructor.
Students were taught to compose multimedia news stories on multiple platforms includ-
ing WordPress.com, Twitter, SoundSlides Plus, and so on.
This study focuses on the learning of multimedia news storytelling in the format of
audio slideshows that involves a sequence of still photos accompanied by a 2.5-minute-
long audio track together with appropriate insertion of natural sounds. As for the audio
track, the students were not supposed to include their own voices in the audio clips but
rather record voices of subjects whom they interviewed and/or observed and edit the
recording(s) into a coherent audio clip. The photos used in the slides were shot, edited,
and sequenced by the students, while in some cases, additional photos were retrieved
online or provided by the subjects in courtesy. Given the absence of the journalists’
voices in the final produce, the instructor also referred to audio slideshow stories as
character-driven narratives in lectures. Students were allowed to ‘choose any news or
feature topic for this assignment as long as it is related to the news events, social issues
or people’s concerns in the local area’. In other words, there were no particular restric-
tions on the news values apart from ‘being local’ (Galtung and Ruge, 1965). Based on the
assignment requirements, students managed to come up with a variety of understandings
of the genre(s) of character-driven narratives and adopted different ways of composing
their stories. Similar to Vasudevan et al. (2010), I refer to the processes of learning and
composing character-driven narratives in the format of audio slideshows as multimedia
news storytelling.
Working as a classroom ethnographer, I took the role of observer in the classroom
throughout the course, video-shooting, audio-recording lectures and student discussions,
and taking filed-notes in class with consent from both the instructor and the students. In
order to understand students’ multimodal composing processes, I conducted semi-struc-
tured interviews with eight students within 1 week after they finished their audio slide-
show assignments. Student interviewees were also invited to bring along the ‘raw data’
based on which they made their audio slideshow stories, including photos, audio inter-
view clips, audio-recorded actual footage of the subject/character(s) interacting with
non-journalist-students or with each other. Using the ‘raw data’ and the final audio slide-
show stories as ‘stimuli’, I asked interviewees questions about specific decisions of mul-
timodal composing. The students’ narrativizing of their own experiences helped reveal
their construct of online journalism practices (Bruner, 1990: 58). Meanwhile, the setting
of interest, excitement, and other emotions that punctuate the unfolding narration also
helped me to interpret the students’ understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the
online news genres and related news production processes. The ethnographic data,
including video- and audio-recorded lectures, classroom/online discussions, interview
transcripts, online assignments, and field notes, are subject to genre analysis, content
analysis, and critical discourse analysis in accordance with the theoretical framework
proposed in the previous section. Through systematic analysis of integrated research
data, a case study is constructed to illustrate students’ multimodal news storytelling as
processes of learning and enacting profession-specific digital literacies as well as accul-
turating themselves into dynamic and heterogeneous professional identities of online
Song 843

journalists. The student (Christina, pseudonym) completed a story on a shoe-shiner in

Hong Kong, entitled Shine for Life. The case was chosen because (1) Christina’s audio
slideshow story has been rated as excellent by the instructor and her classmates; (2) her
interview data have inherently provided rich and extensive information about how she
has designed and produced the story, which demonstrated her meta-awareness and artic-
ulateness concerning her identity as an online-journalist-to-be; and (3) her audio slide-
show story as both process and product is revelatory about the multiple dimensions of
digital literacies required and practiced in multimedia storytelling.

Case study
The present section presents my findings of the case study in two sub-sections. The first
sub-section focuses on multimodal and generic literacies enacted in Christina’s multi-
modal storytelling experience. The second sub-section analyzes the journalistic
Discourses that Christina has consciously subscribed to and embodied in her authorial
stance as an emergent online journalist.

Christina as a multimodal story designer

Christina searched briefly for some news stories about the shoe-shiner from Hong Kong
news websites and went to the shoe-shiner’s work place without much planning. After a
few casual exchanges with the shoe-shiner, Christina started interviewing the customers
and taking photos while the shoe-shiner was polishing their shoes. The questions tar-
geted customers’ opinions about the service and its future in Hong Kong. The service-
related evaluative questions were mostly indirect, including the following: Have you
tried it before? How often and how long have you come here? Why you would like to stick
with the same service for so long? What is so special about his service? When it comes
to the future of cultural heritage, questions become more explicit – some people said that
they would like to stop this kind of service because it obstructs streets in Hong Kong, do
you think we should keep this tradition and why? Additionally, it included audio record-
ings of actual footages of shoe-shiner-customer interaction. After returning with all the
‘raw materials’, she started selecting and editing the audio and visual resources for her
audio slideshow story based on ‘gut feelings’. A nuanced analysis of her story making as
both process and product shows that Christina has engaged in digital literacy practices in
three aspects as can be mapped onto the three meta-functions of SFL: multi-perspective
framing, emotional packaging, and multimodal structuring (see Figure 2). All the photo
slides and corresponding verbal, textual, and natural sound tracks can be found in
Appendix 1.
First of all, Christina has framed the story from multiple perspectives, allowing the
story to establish relevance to the viewers at the personal, the institutional, and the social
dimensions. At the personal level, including customers as minor characters helped reveal
the personality traits of the main character, which may have been invisible when por-
trayed alone (Chen, 2013). One of the actual footages that she has used in her final audio
slideshow (see Appendix 1) is the shoe-shiner calling one of the customers interviewed
sei dong (a diehard friend, ‘死黨’ in Chinese) after the customer told the student that he
844 Journalism 19(6)

Figure 2.  Three stages of narrative structuring.

had been a loyal customer for over a decade. The shoe-shiner’s commentary is self-initi-
ated and simultaneously addressed to the customer and to Christina as an exposition of
their relationship; it reflects not only customer-service but a long-lasting friendship. In
terms of the modes of production, the dual function of the commentary introduced the
mode of participation in addition to the modes of observation and interaction into the
story production.3 The participatory elements included in the final story inherently
engaged the viewers, who were ‘participating’ vicariously as Christina did at the scene
of observation and interview.
The institutional aspect of the story value, on the other hand, is first constructed
through visual presentations of the shoe shining processes. The photo slides (see
Appendix 1) unfolded with a panorama of the shoe-shiner at his working place, and
continued with photos of him at work; the slides showed his working tools and a
shined black shoe. The opening phase was followed by four phases of him interacting
with four different customers, which were intermingled with close-ups of his working
hands, tools, and shined or to-be-shined shoes. The sequential photographic staging of
the shoe-shiner, together with different customers, brought continuous temporal exten-
sions along the story timeline (although compressed in comparison with the physical
time that it took for shoe shining). Even without the auditory tracks, the visual sequence
of one shoe shining event after another established the basic narrative stream of the
audio slideshow story.
The shoe-shiner–customer interactions were presented intermittently with close-ups
of relevant shoe shining tools and other objects in the shoe-shiner’s working environ-
ment. The dynamic editing method not only provided an abundance of visual variety to
the viewers, in terms of shooting distances and angles, but it helped validate the image of
a shoe-shiner with professional expertise.
Apart from the visual track, the institutional story value is further enhanced by the
integration of recount, explanation, and argumentation in the verbal track. As can be seen
in the Subtitle column in Appendix 1, the story started with the shoe-shiner’s narration of
how he has been a self-made man since the very beginning of his career. In between his
narration and self-evaluation commentary about his career and life history, Christina
inserted supportive commentary from the customers to provide side evidence to the
shoe-shiner’s account. The professional expertise of the shoe-shiner became more con-
vincing by the customers’ verbal expression of high satisfaction with the shoe shining
Song 845

service (corresponding to Photo Slide 7 in Appendix 1) and comparative evaluation of

the shoe shining expertise (corresponding to Photo Slides 9 and 11 in Appendix 1) com-
pared with the same photo slides deprived of the auditory track.
At last, the customers’ commentary also helped to build up the social aspect of the
story value. In particular, by linking the shoe-shiner’s hardworking spirit with the Hong
Kong spirit (a customer’s verbal commentary corresponding to Photo Slide 16 in
Appendix 1), the social meaning constructed by the story becomes relevant to the local
viewers, and the trade becomes especially valuable as a cultural heritage in the Hong
Kong context. As a whole, Christina achieved the integration of multiple perspectives by
encompassing the hardworking spirit of the shoe-shiner, his intimate relationship with
the customers, as well as the social importance of the trade.
Multi-perspective framing not only brought width and depth to the story value but
also helped to create a sense of authenticity, especially emotional authenticity, which
is essential for the balanced presentation of a news story. Emotion refers broadly to the
interpersonal meaning in Halliday’s (1978) semiotic framework. Here, emotional
packaging is primarily realized through the strategic remediation of ‘raw materials’.
With respect to the multimedia resources, the emotional nature of authenticity relies on
(1) visual details such as facial expressions and body gestures, which typically indicate
anger, happiness, anxiety; (2) the verbal language of evaluation (Martin and White,
2005) on the auditory track and its conformity to social expectations; and (3) the col-
laboration between the visual mode and the auditory mode in multimodal story
structuring.
In the Shine for Life story, visual details included close-ups of the shoe-shiner’s hands
in Slide 6 and Slide 10, one extreme close-up of the shoe-shiner’s hand in Slide 14, a side
profile of the shoe-shiner in Slide 12, a ¾ frontal medium-close-up profile of the shoe-
shiner smiling toward his customer in Slide 28. Close-ups on the wrinkled hands and the
face of the shoe-shiner were common indicators of hardships in the shoe-shiner’s life,
and arouse viewers’ empathy toward the character. The smiling facial expression was
contextualized in the pattern (Peters, 2011: 306) of customer-and-service-provider rela-
tionship. The situated, relational emotion naturally indicated the friendship and intimacy
between the shoe-shiner and his customer.
Apart from close-ups, Christina also tried to employ backgrounding and foreground-
ing to show the fading of the trade and people’s indifference to that. When asked about
why she chose the second to last slide for her story, she said, ‘it’s also strange thinking.
Because people are moving, he is there. He is out of focus. But he is still concentrating
his work, bowing down and polishing the shoes. People don’t care’.
On the auditory track, Christina employed an argumentative structure by inserting
customers’ commentaries as evidence to the shoe-shiner’s self-evaluating commentary.
She explained her audio-editing decision making as follows:

Christina: Coz at the beginning, the old man says he wants to satisfy the customers, and the
customer says it’s really good or something. It’s like responding to him. It’s not just from this
old man. We can also see from the customers how hard working the old man is. When I put the
customers’ comments in, I was trying to respond to what is before and how to move to another
customer, something like that.
846 Journalism 19(6)

Figure 3.  Interplay between the dual tracks of Shine for Life.

The delicacy of the structuring design resides in the diverse and rhetorical organiza-
tion of the shoe-shiner’s and customers’ verbal discourses of emotion or evaluation in
Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory. The language of evaluation can be catego-
rized into (1) affect, (2) appreciation, and (3) judgment. Affect is ‘concerned with regis-
tering positive and negative feelings’; judgment with ‘attitudes toward behavior, which
we admire or criticize, praise or condemn’; and appreciation with ‘evaluations of semi-
otic and natural phenomena, according to the ways in which they are valued or not in a
given field’ (Martin and White, 2005: 42–43). For instance, as illustrated in the Subtitle
column in Appendix 1, the shoe-shiner’s judgment toward the shoe shining expertise,
spanning from Slide 2 to Slide 6, is expanded through the attributive propositions of
Customer 1 corresponding to Slide 7 and Slide 8. His appreciation of the shoe shining
expertise is further expanded and strengthened by the second customer’s judgment, span-
ning from Slide 9 to Slide 11.
Given the above visual and auditory devices that the student employed to create emo-
tional authenticity, and as a way to engage and rhetorically persuade the viewers to
accept the story value, it is eventually time to analyze how the student integrated the
above devices together in multimedia storytelling.
As discussed in the present section, the student has maintained a narrative storyline in
the visual track while building up a dialogic structure in the auditory track (see Figure 3
above). The narrative line built upon sequences of shoe-shiner-and-customer interactions,
and imbued the intermittent presentation of verbal sequences from the shoe-shiner and the
customers as ‘alternating lines of dialogue’ (Van Leeuwen, 2005: 249) that ‘are joined
with one another and alternating with one another not according to the laws of grammar
or logic, but according to the laws of evaluative (emotive) correspondence, dialogical
deployment, etc.’ (Van Leeuwen, 2005: 249). In between the logic of dialogue, Christina
utilized multimodal coherence. For instance, she explained her decision about multimodal
coherence while maintaining the flow of interaction as follows below. Please note that the
visual-verbal linking devices and corresponding slide numbers in Appendix 1 are marked
in square brackets after the specific section of the student interview episode below:4

Christina: Because he’s talking about the oil [Slide 3] – ‘the polish you cannot be too stinky’
– so I put the photos there [Illustration]. shiny [Slide 4, Anchorage], yeah, and then, like, it
takes a, because this customer is the first customer who talks. I tried to show how this man tried
to polish shoes for him [Slide 5] and yeah he’s talking [Anchorage].

Apart from dialogue-anchored multimodal structuring, Christina also successfully

recreated ‘actuality footage’ to show the intimacy between the shoe-shiner and his cus-
tomer without video-recording from Slide 26 to Slide 27. The verbal track was a lively
Song 847

Table 1.  Comparison between participatory and objective Discourses of journalism (summary
based on Hajunen, 2013: 949–950).

Aspect of comparison Ideal of participation Ideal of objectivity

Definition of news Biased, open-articulated Detached, factual, accurate,
(personal) views, values, and balanced, and fair presentation
interpretations (Soffer, 2009: of reality (Schudson and
487) Anderson, 2009)
Definition of news Not fixed, co-defined by other A hierarchical ‘web of
value/newsworthiness Internet users rather than facticity’, that is, a repertoire
journalists and the institutional of prescribed angles of news
conventions of journalism framing (Tuchman, 1978)
(Yuan, 2013)
Journalistic Discourse of transparency (transparency of news
sources and processes of news production)
Role of the journalist in Writing to and with the public Writing for the public
relation to the public (Matheson, 2004: 453) (Matheson, 2004: 453)
News as conversation (Gillmor, News as lecture (Gillmor, 2006:
2006: xxxiv) xxxiv)

recorded conversation between the customer and the shoe-shiner; she had wisely chosen
two moments of the sequence of interaction. Slide 26 was a medium close-up of the cus-
tomer pouring water for the shoe-shiner. The focal length was typical for showing inti-
mate relationship between subjects in the shooting frame. Slide 27 was the shoe-shiner
sitting on a stool and eating bread. The two images were linked via the continuous pres-
entation of the hissing sound of the plastic bag that wrapped the bread in Slide 27. The
two images, together with the natural sound, were adequate enough to activate the visual
schemata of the scene.
In a word, Christina employed a diversity of multimodal and generic means to present
a multi-perspective, multi-character narrative that engaged viewers with strong emo-
tional authenticity. Most of the strategies analyzed above were not taught in the course.
The case, therefore, illustrates the power of the student’s digital literacy practice that
filled the gap left by the instructor-led online journalism meta-knowledge and meta-
language; with digital literacies, the student was not only able to push the boundaries of
the multimedia storytelling potentials of the audio slideshow but asserting her authorial
stance as an emergent online journalist.

Christina as an emergent online journalist

The previous sub-section analyzed the digital literacies that Christina has constructed
and enacted in both the process and the product of multimodal news storytelling. Yet,
digital literacies are not only a way of meaning making but a way of asserting one’s
authorial stance or identity (Jones and Hafner, 2012). In the present case, Christina has
realized her emergent professional identity as an online journalist by embodying hetero-
geneity of journalistic Discourses, including objectivity, transparency, and participation
(see Table 1 above).
848 Journalism 19(6)

While the format of audio slideshows allows her to maintain a detached role of the
observer and witness aligning with the objective ideal of journalism (Lillie, 2011),
Christina asserted explicitly in the student interview that she did not agree that objectiv-
ity could only be realized by subordinating multiple, balanced voices under an authorita-
tive voice of the reporter, which seems a ‘mission impossible’ in the case of
character-driven narrative as was discussed in class by the instructor. Instead, Christina
explained her efforts in constructing the afore-analyzed persuasive narrative as a form of
‘objective’ reporting and treating the audio slideshow as a site of genuine dialogue,
where multiple voices are ‘juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another,
contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically’ (Bakhtin, 1986: 292). Although
she is using the term ‘objectivity’ in explanation of her story design, she has aligned
extensively with the participatory ideal that regards the role of journalists as perceptive
analysts (Pauly, 2008). She has dialogically reconstructed the story scene by scene, con-
textualized audio interviews with photos (and vice versa), and attended to symbolic
details (see Slides 14, 15, and 25), which are all recognized rituals of participatory ideal
of journalism. The visually contextualized presentation of voices in the story also abides
by the ideal of transparency. In terms of identity formation, Christina’s story design can
therefore be understood simultaneously as her assertion of an authorial stance that nego-
tiates among the three journalistic Discourses of online journalism.

Conclusion
Digital literacies are situated, multi-semiotic meaning-making practices that are co-
determined by the lived experiences of (student) journalists, their professional values,
and multimedia storytelling. As a single case study, Christina’s audio slideshow making
constitutes a limited set of data. The case study cannot encompass all digital literacies for
online journalism, and the findings of the study need to be interpreted in view of its
limitation.
While Christina’s case is regarded as successful by the instructor and her classmates,
it reveals a variety of challenges that journalism students may face in the process of cre-
ating audio-visual news stories as well as how those challenges can be addressed with
learnable strategies (Hafner, 2014: 678). The findings show that multimodal news story-
telling that online journalists (or online-journalists-to-be) are practicing in fulfillment of
the course requirements has gone far beyond technological skills of using computer soft-
ware, digital cameras, and audio recorders. In the case study, Christina has demonstrated
a multiplicity of digital literacies. She reflexively asserted her authorial stance as a pro-
fessional online journalist-to-be by negotiating different journalistic Discourses, multi-
plying news gathering strategies, and exploring meaning-making potentials of
multi-semiotic and multi-generic resources. By mobilizing the semiotic and generic
resources in hand, she has constructed the news worthiness of the story at multiple levels,
engaged the audience emotionally and attitudinally, and enhanced the validity and trust-
worthiness by creating dialogues among the subjects/characters’ voices.
In terms of the transferability of the findings, transmodal coherence and multimodal
structuring strategies are also significant digital literacies required for effective design
of themed news webpages, which involve images, texts, and audio clips, and so on.
Song 849

Even in the case of Twitter journalism, it is not uncommon for Twitter news to include
both images (or photo galleries) and texts. In addition, selecting and framing tweet
quotes, video clips, and photos into a coherent news story (as in storify.com) also
requires (student) journalists to mobilize emotional packaging strategies to bring mul-
tiple voices into meaning dialogues with each other as well as balancing different
journalistic ideals (i.e. objectivity, transparency, and participation) as Christina did in
the case.
While the case study is illustrative of how multimedia could be understood and
practiced in audio-visual news storytelling, it does not involve meaning-making
resources such as some spatial representation resources (e.g. hypertexts, grids), and
user-generated contents as those in Twitter journalism. In order to draw a fuller picture
of digital literacies for online journalism, more case studies need to be conducted in
both professional educational contexts with regard to online journalism practices in a
variety of formats, such as cases of collaborative productions of news tweets among
(student) journalists and non-journalist Twitter users. It also needs to be reiterated that
digital literacies analyzed in the case study cannot be abstracted into prescriptive
guidelines for online news storytelling without careful consideration of the situations
of news production.
Given the afore-mentioned limitation, the case study has two implications.
Theoretically, the analysis of Christina’s audio slideshow making demonstrates how the
theoretical framework proposed in the present study can be useful in examining online
journalists’ digital literacies practices and their professional identity formation. By inte-
grating the SFL and NLS traditions of literacy studies, the framework allows online
journalism education researchers and practitioners to analyze, teach, and assess students’
online journalism practices as both product and process and as both multi-semiotic and
multi-generic meaning-making potentials and instantiations. The framework is proposed
with a specific focus on online journalism because of its richness in multimedia elements
and the dynamic negotiations among pluralizing journalistic ideals.
Nevertheless, the boundary between online and offline journalism is blurry, and cross-
platform practices can be commonly found in major news agencies globally. In the sense,
the framework could help journalism educators understand and analyze journalism prac-
tice in general as long as a critical reflection has devoted to the meaning-making poten-
tials enabled by ever-evolving news packaging formats (Jacobson et al., 2015) as well as
professional ideals that are embodied and enacted in news storytelling.
Pedagogically, the multi-dimensional framework of digital literacies for online jour-
nalism could also serve as a profession-specific framework, which can be used by
(online) journalism educators to design related course curricula. First, the framework
provides a contextualized, holistic, and profession-specific account of (online) journal-
ism practices. In connection with the three sets of skills commonly taught in online
journalism courses, including technological skills, conventional journalistic skills, and
online news packaging skills, the framework of digital literacies requires both teachers
and students to prioritize the notion of journalism practice. Those different sets of skills
are embodied in journalism practice and can only be acquired in a situated manner.
Instead of teaching and learning these sets of skills independently, it would be more
effective to design authentic, situated news storytelling tasks in a variety of news formats
850 Journalism 19(6)

with different semiotic meaning-making potentials. In this way, students are empowered
to exert agency as story designers and mobilize their digital literacies acquired both in
and out of the classroom.
Second, informed by NLS and the genre pedagogy of the Sydney School, the educa-
tors could put more emphasis on the co-construction of a set of meta-language with their
students in critical and reflexive analysis of online news storytelling by others and by
themselves. In other words, the digital-literacies-informed approach allows online jour-
nalism educators to recognize the emergent, dynamic, and creative nature of multimodal
news storytelling and to foster the online journalism classroom as ‘sites for learning in
vibrant, engaging ways’ (Vasudevan et al., 2010: 465).

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive and inspiring comments
on an earlier draft of the article. As the article is developed on the basis of my doctoral dissertation,
I would also like to thank Professor Angel M. Y. Lin, my PhD supervisor, for her guidance during
my study at the University of Hong Kong.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The research was supported by a research faculty startup grant spon-
sored by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China (JJH3152034, Fudan
University, Shanghai).

Notes
1. A paradigm here refers to an educational model that is generally accepted by the researchers
and educators as an effective way to facilitate teaching and learning with a profession-specific
community.
2. Media logic refers specifically to ‘forms and processes which organise the work done
within a particular medium [and] the competence and frames of perception of audiences/
users, which in turn reinforces how production within the medium takes place’ (Dahlgren,
1996: 63).
3. Nichols (2001: 33) identified six modes of documentary in terms of genre, style, and involve-
ment of the documentary makers. Among them, the observational mode allows ‘the film-
maker to record unobtrusively what people did when they were not explicitly addressing the
camera’, while the participatory mode allowed the filmmaker to engage with the subjects
directly and to ‘recount past events by means of witnesses and experts whom the viewer could
also see’.
4. Anchorage and illustration are two strategies of linking between images and words in Van
Leeuwen’s (2005) multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) framework. In the case of anchor-
age, ‘words make the meanings of an image more specific’ (p. 275). Illustration refers to ‘The
text paraphrases the image (or vice versa)’ (Van Leeuwen, 2005: 230).
Song 851

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Author biography
Yang Song is currently an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature,
Fudan University. Her research interests include digital literacies, online journalism education,
discourse analysis, and computer-assisted teaching and learning.
 854
Appendix 1.  Multimodal analysis of Shine for Life.

Slide index Time Image Description Subtitle Sound

1 0:00:00 The shoe-shiner in his I can’t remember how long I have  

working place been a shoe-shiner. It must be
over decades.

2 0:00:05 The shoe-shiner is I didn’t learn from others. It’s all  

working about experience.

3 0:00:12 The shoe-shiner is You can’t be too stingy.  

fetching for shoe oil

4 0:00:16 A shoe under shining Or the shoes would not look Clinging sound of
shiny. shoe shining tools

5 0:00:21 Shining shoes for It takes me a very long time to  

Customer 1 polish shoes.
Journalism 19(6)
Appendix 1. (Continued)
Song

Slide index Time Image Description Subtitle Sound

6 0:00:28 Add oil to a shoe I take it seriously. I want to make  

sure my customers are satisfied.

7 0:00:35 Customer 1 N/A  

8 0:00:40 A shined shoe of N/A  

Customer 1

9 0:00:45 Customer 2 I have been his customer for  

more than 10 years.

10 0:00:51 A hand of the shoe- He is definitely an expert.  

shiner

(Continued)
855
Appendix 1. (Continued)
856

Slide index Time Image Description Subtitle Sound

11 0:00:56 Shining shoes for I have never seen someone shines  

Customer 2 as well as him. Never.

12 0:01:01 A side profile of the I worked in many different  

shoe-shiner industries before.

13 0:01:05 Counting money I would take any jobs, as long as I  

could feed my children.

14 0:01:10 Hands of the shoe- Life is hard. But it is good to be  

shiner self-reliant.

15 0:01:15 A shoe framework No big deal. Just grit my teeth.  

Journalism 19(6)
Appendix 1. (Continued)
Song

Slide index Time Image Description Subtitle Sound

16 0:01:20 Customer 3 I really appreciate him. He shows  

the Hong Kong spirit.

17 0:01:25 Shining shoes for I know it is very tough for him,  

Customer 3 but he never gives up.

18 0:01:30 A shined shoe of We will be sad if this great shoe-  

Customer 3 shiner retires.

19 0:01:34 Rolling up a sleeve He always takes care of me. We  

are friends now!

20 0:01:39 Iron bars next to the There are less and less shoe-  
shoe-shiner shiners in Hong Kong.

(Continued)
857
 858
Appendix 1. (Continued)

Slide index Time Image Description Subtitle Sound

21 0:01:43 Shoe polishing with a Some Chinese people are old-  

focus on the shoe- fashioned. They look down on us.
shiner

22 0:01:47 Shoe polishing with a No one wants to enter the Sound of wrapping a
focus on the shoe industry. newspaper

23 0:01:52 Talking with a N/A  

customer

24 0:01:56 Two pairs of shoes N/A  

25 0:02:01 A box of polishing oil I will send them back to him after  
polishing.
Journalism 19(6)
 Song

Appendix 1. (Continued)

Slide index Time Image Description Subtitle Sound

26 0:02:07 A customer filling Customers here are very nice. Hissing sound of a
water into the shoe- They help me a lot. plastic bag
shiner’s cup

27 0:02:12 Having lunch Even provide food to me. I am  

grateful.

28 0:02:17 Smiling while talking Although I am poor, I’m happy to  

with his customer work here.

29 0:02:26 People pass by the I am almost 80 years old and I will  

shiner’s working place work until the end of my life.

30 0:02:32 Overpass But probably my craft is dying Clinging sound of

out. shoe shining tools
859