The dream of new forms of digital storytelling died. Could it be revived?

Irish Times

a day ago

One of the more surprising – and faintly depressing – aspects of the great technological upheaval in news media over the last two decades has been how little genuine innovation it has produced in narrative form.
Yes, we've had disruption. We've had job cuts, strategic pivots and more than our share of breathless declarations of brave new visions. But when it comes to the actual ways stories are told, the revolution feels a bit thin.
Consider the liveblog, probably the only truly digital-native journalistic form to gain widespread acceptance. Born as a scrappy real-time update format for sports events, it has evolved into the standard operating procedure for covering breaking news, elections and natural disasters. It's useful, flexible and well-suited to how we consume information online. But it's also, let's be honest, hardly the radical reimagining of narrative we were once promised.
There was a time – a moment in the early 2010s – when it seemed we might be on the cusp of something more substantial. Some of us entertained optimistic visions of immersive multimedia storytelling: text, video, audio, graphics and interactivity all woven together seamlessly in a new digital tapestry. Journalism would transcend the old print and broadcast silos. News stories would not just inform but envelop too.
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This brave new world never really materialised.
It wasn't for lack of trying. Media companies have made valiant – sometimes ingenious – attempts to adapt to the platforms that increasingly dominate attention. Podcasts are now an essential part of many outlets' offerings. Short-form vertical video, designed to slide smoothly into your thumb's flick through
TikTok
or
Instagram
, is ubiquitous. There's been steady, incremental progress in integrating social media posts, YouTube clips, photo galleries and links to related stories.
But the dream of rich, interactive, multi-modal storytelling remains just that – a dream. The reasons aren't hard to divine: it turns out that developing those seamless experiences is expensive, labour-intensive and difficult to standardise. When budgets tighten – as they almost always do in this industry – experimentation is the first casualty. Newsrooms learned that it's one thing to build a bespoke multimedia feature, but it's another to do it every day.
Perhaps the greatest disappointment, however, lies not in format but in philosophy. Specifically, the early 2010s saw a genuine – and, in retrospect, touching – optimism about transforming journalism from a one-way lecture into a conversation with the audience. 'Engagement' was the buzzword. User comments were no longer to be tolerated but embraced.
The Guardian
, always fond of a lofty ideal, built much of its global liberal brand on Comment is Free, its opinion vertical explicitly designed to foster a digital 'agora' or public open space. Journalists, it was suggested, would not simply report the news, they would debate it with their readers.
Others eagerly followed, encouraging columnists in particular to jump into the fray. There was a widespread, if now faintly embarrassing, belief that we were on the verge of a more democratic media era, one in which audiences would be not only informed but empowered.
Of course, there were commercial considerations too. With the social media giants siphoning off so much reader attention and discussion, bringing that conversation back 'home' to our own websites seemed a sensible defensive strategy. A reader who's commenting is a reader who's sticking around – or so the theory went.
The reality was messier. Instead of becoming digital marketplaces of ideas, comment sections all too often devolved into toxic bear pits where anonymous users traded insults with ferocious energy and diminishing relevance to the articles at hand. Journalists, understandably, grew weary of their employers facilitating (and sometimes monetising) sustained personal attacks against them. Moderation proved resource-heavy and legally fraught – particularly in a country such as Ireland with its draconian defamation laws.
So the grand experiment quietly collapsed. Comments were switched off. Or hidden. Or shuffled into barely noticeable tabs. The Guardian still has them, technically, but they're harder to find. The Irish Times, like many others, walked away entirely.
And yet, last week, a faint echo of those idealistic days could be heard from an unexpected quarter: the
Washington Post
. The paper, which has endured a bruising year of internal strife, declining subscriptions and strategic confusion, announced a pilot scheme allowing individuals quoted in some of its articles to annotate them with their own perspectives. It's part of a broader package of initiatives, including a more flexible subscription model and 'The Post AI' – an
artificial intelligence
tool designed to answer reader questions based on the paper's own archive.
One might be tempted to scoff. The Washington Post's recent troubles are not minor. Its owner,
Jeff Bezos
, is widely perceived to have altered its editorial positions to curry favour with
Donald Trump
. Executive reshuffles, plummeting readership and high-profile editorial departures have bruised the brand. That its answer now includes a chatbot and a digital margin note feels, at first glance, like a Band-Aid over a bullet hole.
But perhaps there's something worth watching here. Allowing subjects of stories to comment directly – and visibly – within the text itself is a small but intriguing step towards rebalancing the relationship between journalists and their audiences. Done right, it could lend transparency, add nuance and even build trust in an age of mounting scepticism.
Done wrong, of course, it could become another unwieldy experiment abandoned at the first sign of cost overruns or bad PR.
Still, in a media landscape where most digital innovation has boiled down to new ways of selling old formats, any genuine attempt to rethink how stories are told – and how readers interact with them – is welcome. The dreams of the early 2010s may not have come to pass. But they're not quite dead yet.