Audra Skuodaitė - Immersive journalism podcast

Immersive journalism: A form of storytelling that creates points of empathy

What if you could feel the chaos that permeates protests all around the world, see what it is like to spend a day in a detention camp, or experience the journey that refugees fleeing war are forced to take?

This is what immersive journalism is there to do. Virtual Reality headsets help transport the viewer into the center of the action. Inherently subjective, these stories go against traditional journalism conventions. But some think that this is the way forward.

Listen to the podcast to hear more about how immersive stories challenge the norms and routines of traditional journalism.

The podcast guests are Sam Wolson, an Emmy-winning director of “Re-educated”; Judy Walgren, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and Associate Director of the Journalism school at Michigan State University; and Maggie George, a journalism student at Michigan State University.

Judy Walgren discusses final projects with her students in the Immersive Journalism class at Michigan State University. (Photo/Audra Skuodaitė)

The Virtual Reality room at the Digital Scholarship Lab, which is part of Michigan State University Library. (Photo/Audra Skuodaitė)

Maggie George and Anna Mizerowski work on their final project for the Immersive Journalism class at Michigan State University. Their final project is a 360-degree video of a dance performance. (Photo/Audra Skuodaitė)

Althaf Shaik, a Michigan State University master’s student from India, watches Sam Wolson’s Virtual Reality film “Reeducated”. “I would like to watch more of these kind of productions. It would help me to recreate an interest in these kind of subjects,” Shaik said. (Photo/Audra Skuodaitė)

Jingyu Zhang, a Michigan State University doctoral student from China, watches Sam Wolson’s Virtual Reality film “Reeducated”. “For the VR, it’s really cool that I can move my chair and go 360 degrees around to see different things and even up and down,” Zhang said. (Photo/Audra Skuodaitė)