Call for Papers:

Operationalising the Audiovisual Turn in Digital Journalism
Special issue of the journal Digital Journalism
https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/operationalising-the-audiovisual-turn/

Special Issue Editors:

• Jonathan Hendrickx, University of Copenhagen, Department of Communication
  johe@hum.ku.dk
• María-Cruz Negreira-Rey, University of Santiago de Compostela, Department of Communication
  cruz.negreira@usc.es
• Jorge Vázquez-Herrero, University of Santiago de Compostela, Department of Communication
  jorge.vazquez@usc.es
• Sherwin Chua, Hong Kong Baptist University, Department of Journalism
  sherwinchua@hkbu.edu.hk

Deadline for submission of abstracts and bio statements: April 17, 2026

This special issue of Digital Journalism focuses on the ongoing audiovisual turn in journalism, which reinforces the central role of video content in shaping news production, distribution, and the audience experience. This shift has been marked by the rise of novel audiovisual formats which include, but are not limited to, shortform vertical videos shared on non-proprietary social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok (Hendrickx & Vázquez-Herrero, 2024) or news outlets’ own apps and websites (Kalogeropoulos, 2018; Westlund, 2013), podcasts (Groot Kormelink et al., 2025), and video podcasts or vodcasts (Cartes-Barroso, 2024). Ultimately, this shift towards audiovisual news content is reshaping production routines and norms, storytelling forms, audience engagement and relationships, and the epistemologies underpinning the ongoing transformations in digital news work (Lopezosa et al., 2023; van der Nat et al., 2023).

The Digital News Report 2025 affirms that audiovisual journalism is increasingly embraced by younger audiences globally, particularly on third-party platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, while news consumption via traditional platforms such as print and broadcast television continues to decline (Newman et al., 2025). Combined with news publishers continuing to develop innovations in their approaches to the production and distribution of audiovisual content (Chua & Westlund, 2022), these developments increasingly test the limits of journalism’s and journalists’ boundaries and role performances (Maares & Perreault, 2025; Negreira-Rey et al., 2022). This growing dislocation of news and journalism (Ekström & Westlund, 2019) warrants additional explorations into the epistemology and ontology of audiovisual-centric digital journalism, as well as the metajournalistic discourse (Carlson, 2016), addressing issues such as the study of audiovisual formats across different platforms and how journalism, news, and the role of journalists are conceived through these channels

This special issue aims to bring together cutting-edge research that contributes to a better understanding of the audiovisual turn in digital journalism. Said turn builds on earlier forms of multimedia journalism (Deuze, 2004) and digital longform storytelling (Hiippala, 2017; Salaverrí¬a, 2019), and ties in within the previously acknowledged audience, emotional and labour turns in journalism (Costera Meijer, 2020; Nelson & Cohen, 2024; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020).

We invite scholars to submit empirical and theoretical contributions that critically engage with the notion of the audiovisual turn, including how it has been effectuated and can evolve over time. In addition to diverse quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods study designs, we particularly encourage submissions from the Global South, as well as cross-national comparisons that reflect platform-specific and regional differences. Focus areas may include, but are not limited to:

• The de-institutionalisation of audiovisual journalism and news production by considering non-journalistic interloper actors, including influencers and content creators
• The infrastructural platform dependency, algorithmic ambiguity and/or the ownership of audiovisual journalism in the platformisation era.
• A historical evolution of audiovisual journalism from the formats of traditional media to current platforms, considering both common and differentiating elements in journalistic practice.
• The production, contents and reception of audiovisual-centric digital journalism, e.g. shortform, vertical videos and/or audio across news outlets’ proprietary as well as social media platforms.
• The epistemology and/or ontology of audiovisual journalism.
• The news experience and audience interaction through shortform videos and other audiovisual formats.
• The production and publication of AI-generated audiovisual news or news-like content and its disinformation effects in a context of algorithmic curation and consumption.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Proposals should include the following: an abstract of 500-750 words (not including references) as well as background information on the author(s), including an abbreviated bio that describes previous and current research that relates to the special issue theme. Please submit your proposal as one file (PDF) with your names clearly stated in the file name and the first page. Send your proposal via this Google Form by Friday 17 April 2026. Authors of accepted proposals are expected to develop and submit their original article, for full blind ­review, in accordance with the journal’s peer-review procedure. Submissions should be made by the deadline stated, but can of course be submitted ahead in time. Articles should be between 7000 and 9000 words in length and follow standard journal guidelines. Authors selected to submit full papers will be informed by Friday 8 May 2026. The deadline for submitting full papers is Friday 30 October 2026.

[See the link at the top of this post for more information including author instructions. –Matthew]