Abstract
Emotional journalism is being driven by audiovisual technology such as drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, which have demonstrated their usefulness in transforming objective news into news stories from a new visual perspective, facilitating access to dangerous or difficult places. They also allow for greater immersion by an audience that has become an active participant in the news, and they contribute to the storytelling of communication despite the risk to privacy and security that their misuse might entail. The aim of this research is to determine the differences in attention and intensity of the emotions experienced when viewing two pieces of audiovisual news: One was filmed with the technological support of a drone, and the other was produced in the conventional way. The techniques of eye tracking and galvanic skin response were used in 30 Spanish university students. The results suggest that attention was focused on the most spectacular visual elements, although the images filmed with a drone received a higher concentration of attention from the subjects, and this attention was spread throughout the entire image, which demonstrates that drones enhance the effectiveness of panoramic images with natural landscapes. The greatest emotion generated by viewing the images recorded with drones was statistically significant, but it was limited exclusively to these particular scenes, and not to the entire recording of the news.
Highlights
Drones comprise the audiovisual technology analysed in this article, and they are capable of contributing to the development of emotional journalism, since the natural human–drone interaction (HDI) currently allows for the recognition of up to three emotional states from its recordings (Cauchard, Zhai, Spadafora, & Landay, 2016)
While the younger audience continues to stay informed about topics in which they are interested, they are doing so less with conventional media and increasingly with digital media, the latter of which is more innovative in aesthetics and narratives, with the result being that drones can contribute to revitalizing conventional media
The highest percentage of the subjects’ attention was focused on the images filmed with drones, and unlike the rest of the shots, it was distributed throughout the entire image, which confirms the effectiveness of drones for panoramic shots, precisely the easiest to obtain in places of difficult access
Summary
In contrast to objective, unbiased, rational journalism (Liu, 2019) in which journalists even suppress or modify their own emotions as part of their work (Huxford & Hopper, 2020), setting themselves up as independent observers (Wahl-Jørgesen, 2020), there is a new trend known as emotional journalism, which revolves around emotions driven by technology, as already occurs in immersive or virtual reality journalism for the purpose of reconnecting with fragmented audiences (Lecheler, 2020).These new ways of generating news transform facts into personal experiences that create a link between the public, the news, and the journalist (Sánchez-Laws, 2017). In contrast to objective, unbiased, rational journalism (Liu, 2019) in which journalists even suppress or modify their own emotions as part of their work (Huxford & Hopper, 2020), setting themselves up as independent observers (Wahl-Jørgesen, 2020), there is a new trend known as emotional journalism, which revolves around emotions driven by technology, as already occurs in immersive or virtual reality journalism for the purpose of reconnecting with fragmented audiences (Lecheler, 2020). Basic information about the news is not enough to awaken the emotions of the audience, and it is necessary to personalise the stories and represent them with images that awaken the empathic connection (Maier, Slovic, & Mayorga, 2017)
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