News jumps off the page

Meow Wolf announced one million visitors to its Santa Fe exhibit just nine months after opening. In 2023, nearly 18 million people visited the Walt Disney World Resort. Musicians Dead & Company will bring 18 shows to the Las Vegas Sphere throughout 2025. Immersive entertainment — an exhibit where you become part of a show by using all of your senses, solving mysteries or going deep into storytelling — is everywhere. And that’s not all. Community zines run by mutual aid groups, recurring networking events created by Facebook moderators, and even magazines are making comebacks.

While media organizations continually need to work to earn back trust from audiences, people have moved to entertainment mediums to create connections. They could be sharing fandom around a roller coaster, like the bagpipes playing out Six Flags favorite Kingda Ka. Or putting copy into a pamphlet at a co-working space. These experiences create a shared joy that provides a mission, a means to provide information and a sense of togetherness. They encourage stimuli direction and ease cognitive load, which makes learning and remembering easier.

Where does that leave us? Now we move offline. We move to figuring out where people are when they need the information we can provide, and what format is best at that time — like using SMS during a storm that’s knocked out electricity rather than an article. Now, we look at interactive entertainment for the psychological cues they give — like a magician indicating where to look in a way that’s pleasing and logical to our brains — and try to imagine how we can adapt to that kind of information processing. Now we consider how storytelling leaps from the page to the street. It’s the time to quickly adapt to understanding that our jobs are about providing information in ways that are for the audience’s use cases, not testing the understanding gap of how they use our formats. The next phase of our work as newsrooms must be in looking to joyous experiences as thought leaders and using storytelling to boost emotional wellbeing by fostering connectivity in our communities.