A multimedia story is a complex, multidimensional and non-linear narrative form combining different types of media texts, which strives to bring the reader as close as possible to the story being told, while deepening the experience and increasing reader immersion. It is therefore most often some kind of combination of text, photo, video, audio, and graphics while the information transmitted by different media is complementary. Popular elements of multimedia storytelling are recent formats and genres such as infographics and other data visualizations, slideshows, animations, timelines, and interactive maps or even embedded social media posts or interactive elements. The key point of nonlinearity is that the reader is not guided by a rigid single narrative line but can decide for himself the route to take between the different elements and stages of the story, allowing readers to participate and explore.
Today, multimedia storytelling is becoming central to digital and social media journalism. Journalistic stories elaborated in this format are published on web platforms, taking advantage of technical convergence. Convergence allows stories to be placed in a broader context by linking them to online information packages (such as archives, databases, and other related stories) that provide additional background information to the original story. Multimedia stories can thus be organized as hypertext.
One of the earliest examples of multimedia storytelling in digital media was Snow fall, an award-winning story published in 2014 in the New York Times. Including video clips, photography, and scroll-based animations (scrollytelling), the multimedia article demonstrated that traditional text-linguistic storytelling techniques (scene reconstruction, event structure and viewpoint techniques) can be successfully combined with multimedia elements to create an immersive experience. At first the spread of multimedia storytelling was hampered by limited bandwidth and the need for assistance from web developers and designers, but over time, so-called multimedia storytelling platforms have emerged, making it easy to create and edit podcasts, photos, videos and infographics. Multimedia storytelling plays an important role not merely in journalism but also in other fields, such as marketing.
