Over the past years, innovative technologies (such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR)) have become more common within news organizations. These technologies allow users to immerse themselves in a virtual world. With these types of productions, the journalist tries to engage and involve the user by introducing emotional styles, often to create empathy. This does not only demand new technological skills, but also challenges the way journalist allow emotions in journalistic productions, and what role they take in relation to the story and the user. Through fifteen in-depth interviews with immersive producers and experts in renowned news organizations across the globe, this paper examines both the motivations of journalists who produce immersive stories, and how they seek to balance traditional journalistic norms and emotionality in them. The results show that journalists believe that emotions and facts can be compatible with journalistic production. Yet, they struggle with their role in relation to the user. Immersive journalism obliges journalists to carefully reconsider their relationship with their public. In sum, this study illuminates an ongoing professional debate on the role of emotionality, user agency, and journalistic control and autonomy.
From June 28 to July 7 the National Arts Festival took place in Grahamstown, South Africa. For the 20th time Cue, a daily print newspaper about the Festival, was produced by Rhodes University journalism students. It was the first time that the newspaper was printed in full color. Cue is at the core of journalistic production during the Festival. But nowadays, what is a newspaper without pictures or without an online edition? Cue Pix, run by the photo department at the School of Journalism and Media Studies in the AMM (African Media Matrix) provides the pictures. Cue Online is run by the NML (New Media Lab) in the same building and is mostly shoveling print content online. Cue Radio and Cue TV take care of the audio and video, and broadcast during the Festival. Up to 2000 copies of Cue newspaper were printed daily with the number of sold copies around 1600. The newspaper was sold in the Grahamstown streets for 3 Rand. The number of pages of Cue ranges from 16 to 20, including advertisements. Cue is produced by students and lecturers of the School of Journalism and consists of about 50 student-reporters, 10 sub-editors, and 2 editors (who are generally University staff). The productions layout is taken care of by a group of design students. Twenty students from the photo department take care of the pictures and rework them with Adobes Photoshop. Cue TV and Cue Radio (with a total of about 10 students) brought their reporting skills to the Festival as well. Reporting about the Festival by Cue is a major happening that has been growing over the years. From print to TV, to radio and online. This is fantastic, but also reflects equal problems in the media industry: each media platform runs their own show. Print, TV, radio and photography: they all have their own targets, content production, and some coordination. In order to take full advantage of the different possibilities of all the media platforms, convergence is the keyword.
Nursing Leadership is an important competence to develop in order to provide quality of care and prevent attrition of nurses. This research program looked into the perceptions and experiences of nurses on practising leadership. Next to that supporting the development of nursing leadership was addressed. The program has a mixed-method, action research design in which 75 in-depth interviews and 24 focus group interviews and quantitative data of 435 nurses form the backbone. According to hospital nurses, nursing leadership is related to proactiveness and voicing expertise in order to deliver good nursing care. Nevertheless, they do not feel fully competent and knowledge deficits were detected on aspects of the bachelor nursing profile, such as evidence based practice. Working-culture factors can either inhibit or encourage nursing leadership. The further awareness of unconsciously using expertise and knowledge deficits as well as team development towards a continuous safe learning environment are necessary steps for the enhancement of nursing leadership. A Nursing Leadership model was developed in which generic personal leadership competencies combined with expertise of the nurses' level of education and degrees form the essence of shared leadership in teams focussed on the realisation of good nursing care.
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