Media platforms are usually described as technologies and standards that enable media content producers and content consumers to interface effectively. They aim to make mutual discovery, story collaboration, and audience building between content creators and consumers easier and more efficient. Users of media platforms include amateur producers, pro-am and professional producers, and a significant proportion of the content available is user generated content. The concept of a media platform is itself a generic term, encompassing specific types such as a social media platform focused on user-to-user connectivity and communication, or a media publishing platform with content sharing as its primary function. However, these functions are not usually separated, with most media platforms having both social media and content sharing affordances.

Media platforms are therefore online platforms for connecting users and sharing creative content, and the term online platform is mostly used to describe programmable digital architectures designed to organize and facilitate interactions between users. By using information and communication technologies, online platforms systematically collect, use (algorithmically process) and trade data about user interactions and network effects as they operate. They are often defined as digital services available on the internet, including marketplaces, search engines, social media, creative content outlets, app stores, communication services, payment systems, and services comprising the so-called collaborative or gig economy.

Individual online platforms, including media platforms, cannot be considered in isolation from each other, as they develop in the context of an online environment structured by a specific internal logic. This is underlined by the notion of platform ecosystem, which refers to a set of networked platforms governed by specific mechanisms that shape various market and community practices of everyday life (in transport, hospitality, education, or healthcare). Another related concept is the digital ecosystem, which is a combination of interoperating applications, operating systems, platforms, business models and hardware, where the components of the ecosystem do not necessarily have to be owned by the same organization.

As the concept of a platform society highlights, the proliferation of the use of various digital platforms threatens traditional social values (privacy, accuracy, safety, security, fairness, accessibility, democratic control, and accountability) and raises the urgent question of who is responsible for the public anchoring of these values.

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.

Journalism has traditionally involved the use of images and photos. In the past, illustrations complemented the textual content. When the first war pictures appeared in newspapers at the end of the 19th and early 20th century, a new form of journalism emerged, using powerful photography to tell the news. Photojournalism was initially closely intertwined with war reporting, and one of the most famous figures of this age is Robert Capa. His motto highlights one of the basic requirements of photojournalism – to report from as close to the scene as possible: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”.

Through the expressive power of images, photojournalism aims not only to inform the public about what is happening in the world, but also to educate people about various global issues (migration, ethnic minorities), social injustices and inequalities. Unlike other types of photography (documentary photography, celebrity photography, street photography etc.), photojournalism needs to remain honest and impartial. Photojournalists use the camera to capture and create visual representations of a story, and this involves using visual language instead of linguistic means of expression. In this regard, the increasing role of pictures in journalism fits the broader trend known as the pictorial turn.

The technological development of cameras over the years has had a major impact on the evolution of photojournalism. In the age of digital transformation, the use of smartphones and digital photography has become prevalent among journalists. Visual social media platforms such as Instagram offer an attractive opportunity for both professional journalists and amateurs to publish journalistic photos, significantly transforming journalism and photojournalism in particular. Thus, photojournalism today is closely intertwined with both digital journalism and citizen journalism based on the participation of amateur users.

New media culture trends have demanded a change in perspective in journalism and a shift towards a network approach. At the heart of this transition is social media. Despite research showing that social media is the least trusted source of news in the world, the data clearly indicate that it has become the primary platform for news distribution and consumption worldwide. As the logic of social media has replaced the logic of mass media, it has become necessary to adapt the mechanisms of news production and dissemination to the new media environment. This adaptation has a major impact on journalists’ daily work including ways of gathering and distributing news as well as engaging with audiences.

In the news gathering process, social media can be used as a tips line when looking for story ideas, as a source for a story that journalists are working on, or even as content when looking for information for a story. User generated content and crowdsourced information collected on social networks are valued inputs to journalistic work today, while social listening (monitoring social media to discover what’s being talked about by citizens or public officials) is a way to monitor conversations in real time about a current story. Production of news content often draws on the possibilities of social media, for example on ephemeral stories or live streaming, making ephemerality even more central to news consumption. Social media news production also encourages the creation of entertaining, multimedia, and experience-based content. Distribution of news in the mobile and social media world requires journalists to share on multiple platforms as they report from the field. Social media journalists are also expected to provide real-time updates on stories by adapting storytelling to the “language” of each platform. In their day-to-day work, they use mobile devices to capture, produce, and publish content.

Audience engagement is not separated from the newsgathering process and the distribution of news; they often happen at the same time. An effective engagement with the audience includes consistent and authentic interactions because news on social media is a conversation, rather than a lecture. When dealing with the public, an informal yet professional tone, openness, and responsiveness to audience feedback are expected. Thus, social networks have become effective channels for news media to provide information, find sources and story ideas, promote content, drive traffic to websites, and reach, interact and engage with audiences. Although social networking sites are important access points to news for all age groups, they are a particularly popular way for young people to get news. Young people use a variety of platforms and media to interact with the news, which together form a news ecosystem that is mostly managed through apps on mobile devices. Social media also offers them the opportunity to manage and edit their own unique news experiences, providing a wide range of perspectives from professionals to lay people, and allowing direct interaction with the news.

Comics journalism employs comics media to give an account of real-life news events, a reportage. Making drawn pictures accepted as reliable sources of information requires the application of strategies that authenticate them. Wibke Weber and Hans-Martin Rall identify five visual authentication strategies in comics journalism. The application of a meta-story or reflection on the constructed nature of comics reportage are key authentication strategies in comics journalism. Reflexivity means that the comics reportage gives an insight into its making: the author is often present in the pictures, drawing, collecting data for the reportage, or directly addressing the reader as a narrator. This way, the comics reportage stages its own creative process, representing in detail the research methods, the means of data collection and the other details of the journalist’s fieldwork. Touching upon the graphic style, physical resemblance becomes a major means of authentication. So that readers can recognize personalities and places regularly featured in news stories and press articles, characters and decors are drawn so they resemble the photos and videos shown on other media. Therefore, comics reportages are well-documented with photographic resources, or sketches made on the spot. The inclusion of documentary evidence (photos, original documents, infographics, and charts) is not uncommon, enabling the reader to assess the comics reportage as a reliable source of information.

Comics journalism is a genre of non-fiction comics which combines journalistic themes and techniques with storytelling applying two narrative tracks, the visual and the verbal. Comics journalists travel to the site of the event or crisis they report on, gathering evidence and writing it up in comics, transmitting the news to their audiences in the form of visual narratives. According to Julika Bake and Michaela Zöhrer, comics journalism on humanitarian issues aims to incite political action and contribute to long-term education and public awareness-raising. The drawn pictures of comics can reinforce the authenticity of the reports of eyewitnesses and produce a greater effect on the reader than text alone. The emergence of the genre originated in press illustration and political cartoons, but Joe Sacco is conventionally referred to as the first major representative of the genre with Palestine (1993). The genre is becoming increasingly visible on online news platforms, which means it blends with the medial variety of webcomics. As a good example of this hybridization, A Short Tale of Ash and Fire, a scroll-down graphic reportage about Portuguese wildfires by Tânia Alexandra Cardoso, can be read online. The blog of Patrick Chapatte illustrates how comics journalism is becoming increasingly popular, being spread online by the world’s leading press platforms.

Comics studies is an academic field that deals with comics. Within the field of cultural and media studies, comics studies and/or manga studies seem to be emerging. The study of comics as a medium focuses on three major aspects: examining production, industry, distribution, and authorship. Analyses look at media texts in terms of the content conveyed, the creation of comics, and the use of comics language. Studies also focus on the audiences, uses, and reception of comics.

Transversal approaches examine all three aspects, such as the genre, popular geopolitics, or subculture. The recent proliferation of international journals (year of foundation in parentheses), such as the International Journal of Comic Art (1999), Image and Narrative (2000), ImageText (2004), Mechademia (2006), European Comic Art(2008), Manga 10000 Images(2008), Studies in Comics (2010), Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2010), Sequantial Art Narrative in Education (2010), The Comics Grid (2011), and Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art (2012), show the spectacular institutionalization of independent comics studies.

Since the 1980s, independent centres for comic art in Belgium and France have functioned as both collections and museums. In the last two decades, comics research has been organized in several European countries. Germany has a society (ComFor), the Czech Republic and Hungary have university research centres for comics studies (Centrum pro studia komiksu,and Képregénytudományi Kutatóközpont, respectively), and comics research is particularly active in the Nordic countries.

The graphic novel is a variation of comics, not in genre, but in format. Graphic novels came to be as a result of the process of comic books becoming more and more serious in quality and format, claiming a place for themselves on the shelves of bookstores instead of newsstands, where comics were usually sold. Will Eisner is considered to be the first to create a graphic novel, with his work titled A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978). Originating in the USA in the 1980s, the graphic novel has spread to all the comics markets of the world, the publishing of graphic novels being a global trend in the world’s comics industries today.

The distinction between comics and graphic novels is based on format alone, rather than on other characteristics like substance, form, or quality. According to the definition of Thierry Groensteen, the graphic novel differs from ordinary comics in four aspects: (1) variable dimensions, (2) a less vivid colourization, (3) a much more extensive pagination, and (4) a conception of the page layout in which text and drawings are intertwined more freely than in the regular arrangement of panel frames (the waffle-iron grid). Like Persepolis (2000-2003) by Marjane Satrapi, graphic novels can be published in multiple volumes, or previewed in comic magazines like other formats of comics, such as comic strips or Franco-Belgian albums (Maus by Art Spiegelman was pre-published in Raw magazine), but they can also appear in one volume, e.g., Habibi (2011) by Craig Thompson. It is generally assumed that graphic novels are aimed at a wide, adult audience.

Graphic novels can appear in different genres, both fiction and non-fiction, as memoir, autobiography, or comics journalism. These genres often suppose that the author, the narrator, and the protagonist are the same person, and include the acts of writing and drawing in the narrative. Sometimes graphic novels fit into more than one generic category at the same time, for instance, Maus (1986) by Art Spiegelman which tells the life-story of the protagonist’s parents and reports on the trauma they suffered in concentration camps during World War II. This work was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, being the first graphic novel to receive the prize. For graphic journalism, the graphic novel format proves to be very favourable, as for example in the case of Guy Delisle, who publishes reports on his travels in separate graphic novels, such as Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2004) and Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2011).

Informed by the centuries-old tradition of newspaper illustrations, but mainly reflecting the generic characteristics of the autobiographical graphic novel (and certainly inspired by its success), comics reportage developed at the intersection of journalistic practice and comics drawing. The genre became popular in both the North American Comics and the French-Belgian(-Swiss) bande dessinée tradition after the turn of the millennium.

Joe Sacco’s influential war report Palestine (1993) played a crucial role in the recognition and institutionalization of the genre. Indeed, the Maltese-born US comics journalist canonized certain characteristics of the genre through the impact of his reports on the Middle East and the Balkan Wars. Sacco’s work, although retaining some of the authentication procedures of conventional reporting, including references to real space and time, make a spectacular break with the norm of journalistic objectivity. The author-narrator-protagonist is, therefore, in a sense, an autobiographical reporter who draws himself into the narrative, and becomes a character and participant in the events. He reflects on the impressions, experiences, and feelings encountered during his field work, as well as on his own cultural background and biographical history. The latter feature also links the comic book report to autobiographical work. He observes, represents, and sometimes comments on everyday occurrences, and his conversations with local people are also “put on stage”.

Creating comics reportage presupposes both journalistic and cartoonist work and skills, and in the case of the autobiographical tradition (and the innovations heralded by Sacco) one person should possess all these skills. In a lecture, Swiss Francophone comics journalist Patrick Chappatte explained that his work in the field is similar to that of his traditional reporter role: he takes notes, conducts interviews and takes photographs.

Narration is the process of telling a story: the way events are presented in the text has an impact on the reader’s understanding of the story. The characteristics of different media affect narration. Comics is a spatio-temporal medium, which means it is a combination of temporal elements of language and spatial elements of images. It takes time to read temporal forms of art (e.g., literary texts), while spatial forms of art (e.g., paintings) can be read in the blink of an eye.

The narrativity of comics is linked to both the temporal and the spatial aspects of the medium. Narration can become manifest in verbal signs, as in captions, where the narrator speaks directly to the reader mostly in order to make brief comments on the action. In some cases, as in silent comics, narration happens exclusively through visual elements. Since comics are sequences of images, the medium’s narrativity is in many ways similar to narration in film. The narrator’s figure and voice are not very well defined and often disappear, as these media quote the speech of the characters in a direct mode. The images define the reading experience to a greater extent than the voice-over narration in film or the captions in comics. For an informative case study on the issue, see Edward Branigan’s analysis of the dynamics of narration, focalization, exposition, takes and composition in a sequence of Nick Fury comics.