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AbstractOver the past decade, journalists have created in-depth interactive narratives to provide an alternative to the relentless 24-hour news cycle. Combining different media forms, such as text, audio, video, and data visualisation with the interactive possibilities of digital media, these narratives involve users in the narrative in new ways. In journalism studies, the convergence of different media forms in this manner has gained significant attention. However, interactivity as part of this form has been left underappreciated. In this study, we scrutinise how navigational structure, expressed as navigational cues, shapes user agency in their individual explorations of the narrative. By approaching interactive narratives as story spaces with unique interactive architectures, in this article, we reconstruct the architecture of five Dutch interactive narratives using the walkthrough method. We find that the extensiveness of the interactive architectures can be described on a continuum between closed and open navigational structures that predetermine and thus shape users’ trajectories in diverse ways.

Following debates on media pluralism and decentralised public service media, this article discusses the contribution of Dutch public broadcasters to pluralism. While the Dutch system operates under the assumption that external pluralism of broadcasting associations contributes to diversity, here we empirically explored this relation with respect to topics within societal discourse. We argue that mentions of public broadcasters’ programming in newspapers can function as indicators of diversity. As such, we traced mentions of all television and radio programmes by eleven Dutch public broadcast associations in a collection of 263,476 Dutch newspaper articles published during the 2017–2018 TV and radio season. Employing Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling, we thematically contextualised those mentions, which then allowed us to map the breadth of topics associated with programming by different public broadcast associations as well as the extent to which individual public broadcasting associations play a distinct role within a characteristic set of topics. The results of our exploratory analyses support the idea that the external pluralism of the Dutch system produces diversity in alignment with the intentions of the distributed system.