Joining the Dots: The Literacies of Multimodal Longform Journalism

Abstract

Each emerging form of communication demands a new or at least adapted form of literacy. What remains constant is the user’s ability to critically analyse messages in whichever form they take. Multimodal longform journalism requires compound literacies to access, read, process, and make meaning. This article examines how meaning is made when readers navigate a complex, multimodal longform story which requires them to toggle between text, image, video, graphic and hyperlink. It describes the novel approach of autoethnographic textual analysis and delivers a ‘report on experience’ of immersion in five complex multimodal longform stories, followed by discussion of the literacies required to create and consume multimodal longform, and the implications for scholarship.