The news industry is changing due to technological developments. Individuals have increasingly disengaged themselves from traditional outlets, as they rather engage with journalism via mobile devices. This results in increasing competition between news outlets, which caused that these news outlets have to innovate in order to attract and retain readership. Augmented reality (AR) offers the opportunity for journalism to innovate, as it offers new forms of storytelling. In order to understand whether AR news content is relevant for news outlets to adopt, it is important to study how users engage with augmented reality news coverage. To study this, in-depth interviews were conducted, which were analyzed by a thematic content analysis by which three main themes emerged. The findings give a detailed picture of the user perceptions, which show how users engage with augmented reality news content. First, augmented reality news content is new for most users and therefore they have to learn how to use it. Second, the characteristics of the AR medium, including the interactivity, context and visual elements, are of high importance as it can give users the feeling they have control over the news content, it can make complicated news content more clear and it can bring the news content to life. This can give the content added value and relative advantage over other alternatives. Additionally, the findings show that low expectations related to the feeling of skepticism can contribute to a higher feeling of immersion than when having high expectations. Third, this study suggests that users can feel bothered when engaging with AR news content, due to their news consumption habits and social standards, as well as device and space constraints. Because of this, users would be most likely to consume AR news content at home. Additionally, these findings show that users prefer entertaining as well as in-depth augmented reality news articles since this fits their associations with augmented reality and their preferences.

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M. Wayne
hdl.handle.net/2105/50139
Media & Business
Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication

M. Snijdoodt. (2019, June 24). Bringing news to life User engagement with augmented reality news content. Media & Business. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2105/50139