News narratives in locative journalism – rethinking news for the mobile phone

Abstract

This article analyses narrative elements of journalistic texts written for a locative mobile platform. The locative platform prototype called LocaNews works as a framework for writing and reading location-dependent locative news. The system requires that the journalist write three different versions of each story addressed to one of three corresponding proximity zones that makes this locative journalism location-dependent and tailored to the users' position. The journalists had to pay attention to the spatial surrounding elements in order to tailor these news stories to the users’ position. Thus, the article argues that locative journalism is more than a technical platform and should be considered as a journalistic skill. This locative approach affects the texts and the extensive use of several of the text narrative elements might represent a different kind of journalistic storytelling than journalism, as we know it. Three narrative elements stand out and are found particularly important when analysing 738 texts in this form of locative news. These elements are second-person address, the movement imperative and utility formulations.