live journalism – a novel format of journalistic storytelling 

 

Live journalism attracts and engages audiences at sold-out events both in Europe and in the United States. At live journalism events, carefully edited and rehearsed journalistic content is presented to a live audience. 
 

Live Journalism Network brings together people from all over the world who are interested in journalistic live storytelling. 

The network was established during the first-ever international conference on live journalism that was held in May 2022 in Helsinki, Finland. Please join our Facebook group for updates and news on live journalism events!

 

 

live journalism Productions
all over the world

To our knowledge, live journalism shows are produced both in the US as well as in Europe: 
 

• Pop-Up Magazine, US: 

  Founded in 2009, Pop-Up Magazine first premiered for an audience of 300 people. Since then, the production has quickly gained popularity and scaled in size, having reached tens of thousands of spectators. The shows consist of original stories by journalists, brought to life with art, music and performances. The content of each performance is not disclosed before the opening night and nothing is recorded either: It is an immersive and intimate experience, all in the moment. 

  The production team includes various professionals from different fields, such as editors, producers, art and photo directors, music directors, tech professionals, and an events team. In addition to the performances, the team has published The California Sunday Magazine, an award-winning magazine covering stories from the Western America, Asia, and Latin America. They have also arranged performances and co-operation with other organizations and media companies.
   

• Live Magazine, France, Belgium (+others): 
  The France-based production, Live Magazine, has held over a hundred shows since their launch in 2014. The shows bring on stage award-winning professionals from different fields of journalism and other creative fields. Over the years the production has also grown internationally, now organizing shows in many cities across Europe and gathering performers from all over the world. 

 

• The Black Box (Musta Laatikko), Finland:
  The Black Box shows, inspired by Pop-Up Magazine in the US, started in early 2016 at the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki. The shows are produced by the newsroom of Helsingin Sanomat, the largest daily newspaper in Finland. Since the beginning, the 17 unique live shows have reached 40,000 people and welcomed over 100 staff writers from the newsroom on stage to share their stories. Together with a group of media scholars, the Black Box production team launched a research project on live journalism in 2019 and jointly organised the first-ever live journalism conference in Helsinki in the spring of 2022.  
   

• Diario Vivo, Spain: 
  Originally inspired by other live journalism projects, Diario Vivo was founded in 2017, premiering for an audience of 250 people in a local nightclub. Since then numerous shows have been sold out and reached a total audience of over 10,000 people. The shows take place in theaters, which has been especially important to the production team. One of the founders and editor-in-chief of Diario Vivo, François Musseau, has described theaters as “the last oasis of undivided attention”, which captures the uniqueness and intimacy of the show. Behind the show is a production team with a strong background and expertise in journalism. The performers, however, can come from any background – as long as they come with a story. The stories are carefully edited and rehearsed with the production team to bring out the unique and intriguing details that can truly catch the attention of the audience.
   

• DoR Live, Romania: 
  DOR live was founded in 2017 in Romania, and the shows have since reached thousands of people. The shows consist of various performances by not only journalists but also artists from different fields. The project has been successful in amplifying emotional impact, deepening the connection with the community and offering creative training for the staff.
   

• Zetland Live, Denmark
   

• Reporter Slam, Germany: 
  Reporter Slam, which first started in 2016, has developed a unique twist on live journalism, combining stand up comedy, journalism, and a friendly competition. The idea behind the Reporter Slam is to have journalists compete with their stories and to let the live audience choose their favorite by cheering for them. Different from many other productions, the performers are not coached or scripts edited by the production team, resulting in a spontaneous and laid-back atmosphere. After the success in Berlin, the slams are now organized in various cities across Germany and also in other countries.
   

• News on Stage, UK: 
  The News on Stage project started in 2020 with successful events both online and face-to-face. The team consists of academics and writers all interested in interaction between journalism and theater. The shows include journalists who bring their news and stories to life with a variety of means, such as actors, live guests, audience participation, stage-lighting, audio, music, photography and video clips. The project also focuses strongly on interaction with the audience, inciting discussions on the topics.
   

• stiched!, Canada

 

• MES | Live Journalism, Fontys Academy for Journalism, The Netherlands
  As an educational project, MES seeks to offer live journalism both as serious output and as a way of training young journalists at Fontys. Research and practice go together in this project. MES ran a trial performance about ‘water democracy’ in the Netherlands. Students of various disciplines worked together to create performative perspectives on how the Dutch relate to water – ranging from informative to imaginative. During evaluation interviews afterwards, students interestingly said that to produce live journalism requires a very different body of knowledge about the subject matter. “The image of a situation or character you portray is comprehensive, so you’ll have to take account for both your research materials and your artistic choices; look at the overall interests of parties as well as their intrinsic motivation.” That is to say that even the process of making, before having performed anything, is of added value to aspiring journalists.

 

• Journalistikk LIVE, Norway
   
• De Balie, The Netherlands
   

• Sunday Papers Live, UK
   

• Is your show missing from the list? Please inform us!

  
  
   

RESEARCH ON LIVE JOURNALISM EXPANDING 

Live journalism has been already studied by the academia in the UK, Canada, Finland, and in the Netherlands. This is a list of recent publications on live journalism. Please inform us about the newest, published studies or projecst!
 

• Anna Eveliina Hänninen (2023): The Rise of the Talking Journalist – Human Voice, Engagement, and Trust in Live Journalism Performance (Journalism Practice)
  Live journalism performances have become a rising trend in journalism to gain audiences’ trust and engagement. This article examines how live journalism shows bring talking journalists into the limelight. It illustrates how audience’s experiences regarding journalistic talk provide an understanding of how the idea of trust is negotiated during a performance. The empirical material includes audience surveys and interviews from the Finnish live journalism show Musta laatikko in 2019. By bringing together aspects from journalism studies, social psychology, and sound studies, the article demonstrates the nuanced ways audiences discuss the atmosphere of the show. Especially interesting is how audiences experienced journalist’s professional competence through talk. Notably, talk as a medium was seen to reduce, in positive ways, the distance between a journalist and audience but not the trust between them. Finally, the article demonstrates how live journalism and live talk can provide audiences with much-welcomed algorithm-free and full-concentration possibilities to consume journalism.
   
• Catherine Adams & Glenda Cooper (2022): “I Felt I Got to Know Everyone”: How News on Stage Combines Theatre and Journalism for a Live Audience (Journalism Practice) 
  Abstract: Journalism has been suffering a crisis of trust in recent years and in order to re-engage with disconnected audiences, media organisations have turned to creative forms of communication. Some of these draw on the concept of “live journalism”, where both journalists and their stories are presented to a live audience. Various examples in the US and Europe have already been examined; this paper looks at the emergence of live journalism in the UK, and its potential in creating engagement in the public sphere. The authors reflect on two online events they produced as part of their “News on Stage” project during the Covid-19 pandemic, in which journalists presented previously unpublished stories, using dramatic techniques such as verbatim theatre, stand-up comedy, and soundscapes. Using creative, practice-based research, considered relevant to the study of journalism today, they discuss the experience of staging these events to analyse themes of dramatisation, truthfulness, and connection. The authors use ethnographic research, supplemented with audience and participant feedback, to show that this kind of fusion of journalism and theatre can increase interest and trust in journalism and build closeness with audiences.
   
•  Lucia Vodanovic (2022): Aesthetic Experience, News Content, and Critique in Live Journalism Events (Journalism Practice, 16:1)
  Abstract: Journalism events, not often explored within academia, bring together journalistic values, stories, and professionals with elements of theater and spoken word performances to engage audiences in a physical gathering. This article discusses two case studies from the UK, the festival Sunday Papers Live and the monologue No Direction Home: Refuge Woman, analyzing how their format and set-up shape the content being delivered, and asking if they constitute a realignment of traditional journalistic forms in aspects such as news genres and use of sources. It establishes that live events could potentially foster a slower engagement with news, provide the audience with an opportunity to understand aspects of the production and funding of journalism and, in the case of the monologue studied, present a novel way of working with sources. It also addresses the idea and practice of critique to argue that, despite their significant differences, these live events unpack how stories are constructed and therefore suggest, explicitly or not, that news can be formed in a variety of ways.

 

• Juho Ruotsalainen & Mikko Villi (2021): ‘A Shared Reality between a Journalist and the Audience’: How Live Journalism Reimagines News Stories (Media and Communication, Vol. 9 No 2)  
  Abstract: Live journalism is a new journalistic genre in which journalists present news stories to a live audience. This article investigates the journalistic manuscripts of live journalism performances. With the focus on texts, the article reaches beyond the live performance to explore the wider implications and potentials pioneered by live journalists. The data were gathered from Musta laatikko (‘Black Box’) manuscripts, a live journalism production by the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. The manuscripts were analysed as eudaimonic journalism through four conceptual dimensions: self-transcendence, autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The results show how eudaimonic journalism can contemplate history, the future, and the meaning of finite human life. Moreover, by describing self-determinant individuals and communal social relationships, eudaimonic news stories can foster a sense of meaning and agency in audience members. By employing eudaimonia, journalists at large can reflect on the meaning and purpose of contemporary life and offer a more comprehensive understanding of the world. Such understanding includes not only facts and analysis, but also values, affects, and collective meanings mediated through the subjectivity of a journalist.
   
• Catherine Adams (2020): NEWS ON STAGE: Towards Re-configuring Journalism through Theatre to a Public Sphere (Journalism Practice 15:8)
  Abstract: Journalism’s various crises have been well-documented, such as the decline in its credibility and active role in the democratic process, but constructive ideas to address them are far and few between. In an age of confused news literacy, this article presents evidence to show how face-to-face journalism might be successful in helping to re-establish its status, authority and truth-telling role in society. It reviews past and present relationships between journalism and theatre and uses them as a springboard to introduce the concept of “news on stage”. It makes historical connections between early formats of live news such as the town crier, through revolutionary theatre to today’s experiments in event journalism around the world. Using qualitative, empirical data from interviews and two case studies, the FT Weekend Festival and the Byline Festival, it examines whether and how such events offer ways of strengthening the relationship between news, public and performance, rebuilding communities of readers and/or activists. It configures a version of Habermas’s public space/sphere as a new locus for this kind of open journalism, performed to the public. The author concludes that journalism can benefit from such events and proposes practical models for presenting “news on stage” in the future.
   
• Jaakko Lyytinen (2020): Pulling back the curtain: How live journalism is re-engaging news audiences. (Journalist Fellow Paper, Reuters Intitute for the study of Journalism, University of Oxford)
  What exactly is behind the appeal of live journalism? What kind of connection does it forge between journalists and the different audiences? How does one go about putting on such a show? These are the questions that Jaakko Lyytinen, feature writer at Helsingin Sanomat and producer of 'Musta laatikko', studied as a journalist fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University in 2019–2020. In his final report, he shares his findings and lessons learnt.