Technological evolution on digital content processing and mediated communication has created multiple publication means, which can be employed for information channeling and dissemination. The present chapter analyzes in detail the important topic of cross-media publishing and storytelling that resulted in changes in the news reporting chain and created new ways of making journalism. It also involved fundamental changes in both ends of media production and consumption and consequently in the way that informing streams arrive to the end users. Taking into consideration that journalistic organizations utilize all the available propagation paths to spread their product, this section discusses the historic evolution of cross-media, defining multi-channel publishing procedures and presenting the various devices which can be utilized as receiving terminals. As a final point, the cross-modal attributes of the presented paradigms are studied for their potential usefulness in multimodal integrated authentication solutions.
TopIntroduction
During the past thirty years, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have transformed the media industry considerably. Digitization of media organizations and their procedures has facilitated changes in the main processes and practices of journalism (Erdal, 2007). A deriving consequence is that the complete control over news production and dissemination no longer belongs to the media companies, now that users can participate in every part of the process (Bruns, 2005; Ibrus & Scolari, 2012; Conrado, Neville, Woodworth, & O’Riordan, 2016; Mikos, 2017). Historically, newspapers, radio and TV mediums could publish news only on their designated channel. Specifically, newspapers were producing print editions, radio stations were transmitting radio programs and TV stations were broadcasting TV programs (Veglis, 2012). The convergence of ICTs created new opportunities and, for the first-time, media companies could utilize various channels in order to disseminate news.
In the heart of this development was the digitization of the production systems, enabling content to travel across-media boundaries, which were sealed in the previous decades. Television footage and radio soundbites could be published on the Web and television sound was frequently used on radio (Erdal, 2007; Veglis, 2012). This resulted in fundamental changes in the workflow of both media organizations and journalists (Sabelström, 2001; Papacharissi, 2017). The news is now produced once and deployed in various formats for different delivery channels. That allowed media companies to cover more audience needs, to deploy channels that complement each other, but also to attempt attracting younger users that tend not to consume news through traditional delivery channels (print, radio, TV). Trends in the worldwide media industry have clearly shown that, in order to guarantee long-term success with audience in the future, it is vital to change from a single product to a multimedia framework and a user-oriented approach (Dietmar, 2008). Thus, nowadays, media companies are changing and distribute news in a synchronized manner via different channels, guiding their readers from one medium to the other, in order to generate brand loyalty. According to Ibrus and Scolari (2012), the above practice is what we call cross-media storytelling (CS), in terms of popular knowledge, i.e. when news items are disseminated across multiple channels using a variety of media forms. The synchronous use of different transmission routes enables media outlets to make contact with their audience in a comprehensive and cross-modal way, using the involved channels as independent delivery paths. Thus, the same information is available via many different terminals and communication ways (Dena, 2004). Apart from CS, trans-media storytelling (TS) describes the narration of a single story across multiple platforms and formats, including modern interactive technologies that enable active user participation with possible content contributions (Jenkins, 2003; Ibrus & Scolari, 2012). The importance of cross-media publishing is due to many factors, namely the introduction of new technologies, changes in users consuming behavior, adoption of the new smart devices (smartphones and tablets) and new documentation capabilities (Rogobete, Peters, & Seruga, 2012; Heinrich, 2011; De Torres & Hermida, 2017). Along with the introduction of multiple media, co-production and cross-platform storytelling models, rethinking about copyright (Lessig, 2008; Bauman, 2013) and misinformation propagation (Katsaounidou & Dimoulas, 2018) emerge as side effects of the rapidly transforming media ecosystem.