A New Collaboration to Advance Immersive Storytelling

The promise of virtual reality has been with us for decades, but it is only in the past few years that technological advances in this space have made us pay closer attention to the opportunities for journalism and wonder whether society is finally poised to broadly adopt the technology. The Knight Foundation is joining Google News Lab and the Online News Association (ONA) to help create an international network of journalists to explore and share knowledge about their work with immersive storytelling. It’s called Journalism 360, and in its first year, Knight and Google News Lab will invest a combined $500,000 for grants, events, workshops, webinars, and an online resource hub on Medium.

Knight and Google News Lab joined together in a collaboration with the Online News Association after discovering that we were both hearing from many of the same journalists about a need to support learning and experimentation in VR journalism. We’re all still learning, but with analysts predicting a $150 billion virtual and augmented reality market by 2020, we’re excited to work with our colleagues at Google, ONA and the vibrant network around this project, to move forward towards new ways of doing journalism.