5 Online story construction

‘The trick is not to take an analogue mind into a digital world.’

Jeanette Winterson, author1

Non-linear storytelling

Newspaper and broadcast stories, as was seen in Chapter 4, are built on a linear model. However, much has been written about the non-linear nature of online. Users have the power to go where they please, gathering content. They can link from information chunk to audio file, to database, to graphic, to text summary, to video, to archive, and then disappear through an external link to another site. That does not mean that all users do, but they can if they wish. This pattern of consuming information is a haphazard zig-zag rather than a line. And every pathway created by every user can be different. ...

Get Journalism Online now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.