Values in Practice: Ethics, Impact, and Sustainability in Immersive Journalism
- Ioanna Georgia Eskiadi
- Mar 13
- 13 min read
Ethnographic observations across ten newsrooms and interviews with 100 audience members on a quest for shared XR ethics.
Image of flooding in Western Germany from The Guardian's "At least 58 dead in Germany as heavy rains bring catastrophic flooding," Philip Oterman, July 15, 2021. This article isn't part of the research conducted in this article but covers the same subject matter as one of the VR projects investigated.
Editor's Introduction
Ioanna Eskiadi helps us consider XR values in the sense of ethics. How do we caretake audiences while respecting their agency? How do we help them make sense of horrific events without pulling too hard at their heart strings? Ioanna has spent the last couple of years visiting newsrooms, observing production meetings, and talking with creators about XR for journalism. Most of what she observed were projects relating to natural disasters and conflict zones. Although she comes at the material looking to define ethical frameworks, she also has wonderful insights into impact VR production strategies, including sound design, audience agency, and Gen Z needs.
A journalist stands inside a motion-capture studio, sensors strapped to her wrists and ankles as she records a guided walk that will later shape how audiences move through a digitally reconstructed refugee camp. Around her, cameras capture each step. On nearby monitors, rows of white tents stretch across dusty ground; narrow footpaths wind past water stations and makeshift shelters. The environment has been built from satellite imagery, field photography, and spatial audio recorded on location.
Inside the headset, late-afternoon light casts long shadows across the tents. Distant voices drift through the air. Footsteps crunch softly on gravel. The experience is designed to help audiences understand displacement spatially — not only through images or statistics, but by walking the same routes residents take each day. Producers gather around the screens. One adjusts the virtual lighting. A developer fine-tunes the soundscape.
“Can we warm the light a little?” someone asks.
“What about adding music here?” another suggests.
Then a pause.
“Does that feel emotionally manipulative?”
A journalist looks up from her monitor. “And how will users know what’s reconstructed — and what’s verified?”
The room goes quiet.
This is immersive journalism in practice.
This form of virtual reality, often explored through wraparound headsets, first entered the field of journalism in the early 2010’s as reporters started using the technology to add context to their reporting, especially from conflict and disaster zones. Now in its second decade of newsroom integration, immersive journalism is raising a host of challenging ethical, workflow, and distribution questions that seem to point towards a new set of journalistic standards. This article explores the emergence of these new standards with an eye towards facilitating dialogue and reform across the industry and its funders.
RESEARCH BACKGROUND
As a researcher at the Peace Journalism Laboratory at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, I have observed how rapidly evolving technologies are being integrated into newsroom environments — often without corresponding ethical frameworks or institutional policies. So in 2024 I began working with a small interdisciplinary team of researchers to conduct ethnographic observations in ten newsrooms developing VR projects. This included semi-structured interviews with twenty journalists, designers, and developers, and audience testing sessions with approximately one hundred participants. Fieldwork focused on European public broadcasters, nonprofit journalism organizations, and independent immersive studios working in partnership with newsrooms. Institutional names are partially anonymized in accordance with research ethics agreements.
Projects under study included flood reconstructions, refugee camp walkthroughs, and conflict-zone simulations delivered primarily as room-scale virtual reality experiences. By combining newsroom ethnography with audience response analysis, the study aimed to move beyond theoretical debates about immersive media and instead document how ethical decisions are negotiated in practice — through design choices, workflow constraints, and platform dependencies.
The findings presented in this article reflect that empirical work, situating immersive journalism not as a technological novelty, but as a site where core journalistic values — accountability, care, transparency, and sustainability — are being actively redefined
The Editorial Challenges of VR Journalism
One of the first questions we examined in our study was what approaches to VR are most impactful. We discovered a persistent tension in immersive journalism between emotional pull and audience agency. For instance, in 2024, severe flooding in western Germany caused widespread damage to residential neighborhoods, critical infrastructure, and transportation networks, displacing thousands of residents and prompting renewed public debate about climate adaptation and emergency preparedness. News organizations turned to immersive reconstruction to help audiences understand the spatial dimensions of the disaster — mapping water levels inside homes, tracing evacuation routes, and visualizing how rising rivers moved through entire communities.
Early VR prototypes sought to convey urgency through dramatic sound design and atmospheric cues, positioning users at street level amid simulated emergency sirens and flowing debris.
One editor recalls reviewing these dramatic, early prototypes and asking his team, “Is that informative — or just emotional?” During audience testing of the prototype, participants consistently oriented toward the implied source of the sirens rather than examining physical damage in the environment. Several testers described imagining rescue scenarios instead of focusing on architectural details such as waterlines, debris patterns, and elevation changes between homes. After the sirens were removed in a later prototype, users spent longer inspecting structural elements — doorframes, staircases, and drainage paths — and post-experience discussions shifted toward infrastructure vulnerability rather than emotional response.
In many of our site observations, we found production teams more involved in ethical debates than technical ones. Should users be guided or allowed to wander? How much context belongs inside the experience itself?
In traditional journalism, editorial judgment is largely visible through language, framing, and sequence. In immersive journalism, those same judgments are embedded in spatial design — where users are placed, what they can access, how sound directs attention, and which paths are available. Because audiences assemble meaning through exploration, these choices can feel neutral or self-directed, even when they are carefully choreographed. Editorial influence becomes environmental rather than narrative, experiential rather than textual — and therefore harder for audiences to recognize or contest.
Some teams experimented with ways to surface editorial decisions. In the same western Germany flood reconstruction discussed earlier, developers added optional annotations indicating which elements were verified and which were digitally modeled, alongside a companion article explaining reconstruction choices. Users appreciated the transparency but found it awkward in practice: annotations interrupted immersion, and many forgot to activate them once inside the experience. These early efforts reveal both progress and limitations. Newsrooms are beginning to expose their choices — but are still learning how to do so without breaking presence.
These kinds of design choices illustrate a broader shift in immersive journalism. Together, they reshape not only how stories are told, but how they are known. Authority moves from explanation toward experience. Journalists no longer simply report events; they design worlds. Decisions about camera placement, navigation paths, soundscapes, and interaction logic quietly shape what audiences feel, notice, and overlook.
This hybridity — part journalism, part documentary, part interaction design — complicates familiar ideas of objectivity and authorship. Presence and affect now sit alongside facts as sources of meaning, opening powerful possibilities while raising urgent questions about emotional influence and editorial responsibility.
And no subgroup of testers was more sensitive to this tension than Gen Z.
Generation Z: Agency, Data and Emotional Autonomy
For many Gen Z participants, emotional autonomy mattered as much as transparency. They did not reject affect, but they resisted being steered. When immersive experiences on swelling music, automatic camera movement, or tightly scripted pacing, participants described feeling managed rather than engaged. One refugee camp prototype was criticized for “trying too hard to make me sad.” As another participant put it, “If you want me to care, let me figure that out.”
Several production teams were already grappling with what they described as emotional steering — the use of audio and atmosphere to shape audience feeling in advance of interpretation. In an early prototype of a humanitarian VR project reconstructing a temporary displacement shelter, soft piano music accompanied users as they entered the space. Initial audience testing produced heightened affective responses, with participants focusing primarily on how sad the experience felt. Unlike the siren case, which redirected attention spatially, the music functioned as an emotional frame, setting the tone before users had encountered any details. After the soundtrack was removed, participants spent longer examining practical elements — storage shelves, bedding arrangements, and exit routes — and post-experience discussions shifted toward logistics such as supply distribution and daily living conditions. Without musical cues prescribing mood, users began asking what happened next and how residents organized their routines. As one producer reflected, “It stopped being a performance. It became a space people could think inside.”
This pattern appeared repeatedly. When viewers were free to move and encounter details without heavy emotional cues, post-experience discussions shifted away from how “sad” the experience felt toward structural issues such as infrastructure, response systems, and policy gaps. For Gen Z in particular, meaningful impact was not defined by emotional intensity but by whether experiences preserved agency. Participants wanted to know what was reconstructed and why they were placed in certain scenes — while retaining space to interpret events on their own terms.
Data transparency proved equally central. After learning that commercial headsets track gaze, movement, and interaction time, many immediately asked who owned that data and whether it extended beyond the journalism experience. As one participant remarked, “It’s not just what I click — it’s where my body goes.” Unlike older participants, Gen Z consistently framed immersive journalism as inseparable from the platforms delivering it. Trust depended not only on storytelling choices but on infrastructure: platform ownership, behavioral tracking, and governance.
Some projects experimented with responses, adding onboarding screens that explicitly outlined what user data was collected, including movement and interaction metrics, and offering reduced-guidance modes that disabled background music and automated navigation cues. Participants appreciated these efforts unevenly. Many welcomed the data disclosures but skipped them once immersed; others briefly tried reduced-guidance settings before returning to default modes. While these early interventions were imperfect, they reflected growing recognition that both emotional design and data practices require visibility, even when transparency complicates immersion.
Together, these responses suggest that immersive journalism works best not when it maximizes feeling, but when it protects agency. For Gen Z, immersion alone was not persuasive. Trust emerged instead from transparency about reconstruction, clarity about data collection, and freedom to engage at a self-determined emotional depth. In post-experience discussions, participants were more likely to ask structural questions, debate policy implications, and reflect on next steps when experiences avoided heavy emotional steering. In this sense, VR’s value lay less in momentary reaction than in what those encounters enabled: reflection, dialogue, and more sustained engagement with public issues.
Ethical Tensions in Immersive Storytelling
While audience discussions revealed concerns about emotional steering and data opacity, newsroom interviews exposed a deeper structural issue: immersive journalism operates within platform ecosystems not designed for journalism. VR production depends on proprietary tools and commercial headset infrastructures built for engagement, behavioral analytics, and scalable interaction — not editorial accountability. Even when newsrooms avoid storing gaze or movement data, they remain dependent on systems they do not control, including content moderation policies, safety standards, and governance frameworks for shared virtual spaces. Questions about who moderates immersive environments, how distress is handled, and where responsibility lies when harm occurs remain largely unresolved. Editorial storytelling thus becomes entangled with technological platforms whose priorities — growth, retention, and data extraction — may not align with public-interest reporting.
This dependency raises governance questions that extend beyond individual projects. Who regulates immersive environments? Who sets moderation standards in shared virtual spaces? Who bears responsibility when audiences experience distress inside highly embodied crisis simulations? Traditional journalistic ethics address sourcing, fairness, and representation, but offer little guidance on immersive-specific practices such as the collection of movement and gaze data, the psychological effects of placing users inside traumatic scenes, or the role of platform algorithms in shaping what experiences are promoted, recommended, or made visible.
Audience care reveals a similar institutional gap. Journalists described making trauma-related design decisions — how long users remain in confined spaces, whether to include distressing audio, when to provide exit prompts — without shared standards or formal training. As one producer noted, “We’re making mental health calls without being mental health professionals.” These choices were typically negotiated within small teams rather than guided by newsroom-wide policy.
Conflict reporting makes these tensions especially visible. In one VR reconstruction of a bomb-damaged neighborhood, users stood at street level amid looping explosions and sirens. The experience conveyed proximity and vulnerability, yet provided minimal historical context. Participants described feeling overwhelmed by immediacy while remaining uncertain about the broader causes of the violence. Immersion intensified presence, but did not automatically deepen understanding.
Addressing these tensions requires operational change: embedding consent into interface design, clarifying data governance, integrating trauma-aware protocols, and establishing institutional accountability for platform dependency. In immersive journalism, ethics cannot be a post-production layer. It must be built into design, distribution, and maintenance from the outset. VR expands journalism’s expressive power — and the consequences of getting it wrong.
Sustainability and the Cost of Ephemerality
The ethical challenges of immersive journalism extend beyond audience care and data governance to sustainability itself. Journalism’s public mission depends on continuity and institutional memory. Yet across newsrooms, VR repeatedly followed what practitioners described as a cycle of project-based innovation: secure short-term funding, produce a flagship experience, showcase it — then quietly abandon it once support ends. Immersive work rarely becomes part of everyday editorial practice.
One former VR editor described this pattern in the aftermath of the same western Germany flood reconstruction discussed earlier. Although the project received strong press and industry recognition, funding expired and the team was disbanded. Within a year, the experience no longer ran on updated devices. “It still exists somewhere on a server,” she said. “But no one knows how to access it.” What troubled her most was not the technical decay, but what she called institutional forgetting: hard-won insights about workflow, ethics, and audiences disappeared with the team, forcing subsequent projects to start from zero.
Her story reflects a broader pattern. Immersive journalism produces insight, but rarely infrastructure. VR typically lives at the margins of news organizations, housed in innovation units rather than embedded in core reporting. Because it depends on individual champions, knowledge disappears when staff move on. Practitioners described this condition as VR’s “perpetual pilot mode.” Sustainability here is not only financial — though immersive projects are expensive and grant-dependent — but organizational. VR literacy remains concentrated in small teams, workflows are rarely shared, and editorial ownership is often unclear.
Platform dependency compounds these challenges. Most projects rely on proprietary tools and commercial headset ecosystems that change rapidly. Operating system updates break experiences, app store policies shift, and costly redevelopment becomes routine. Without preservation strategies, immersive journalism becomes ephemeral by design, raising a deeper ethical question: what does it mean to invest scarce journalistic resources in formats that reach limited audiences and decay quickly?
Editors were acutely aware of this tension. Immersive projects compete with core reporting needs in already strained newsrooms. Yet many also viewed VR as a laboratory for designing the future of storytelling — a space to explore audience agency, emotional design, and platform dependence in ways increasingly relevant across journalism. What immersive journalism lacks is not creativity. It is continuity.
For VR to function as public-interest journalism rather than technological spectacle, it must move out of innovation silos and into institutional practice, even at modest scale. Some smaller organizations attempted this by developing modular environments that could be reused across stories, maintaining shared documentation so workflows survived staff turnover, and partnering with universities or public broadcasters to support long-term maintenance and training. These arrangements did not eliminate precarity — most projects still depended on grant funding and volunteer labor — but they extended the life of experiences beyond single launches and helped retain institutional knowledge. In several cases, teams were able to adapt existing VR environments for new reporting or incorporate immersive methods into routine editorial planning. While uneven and fragile, these experiments suggested that sustainability in immersive journalism is less about permanent funding than about organizational continuity: building practices that persist even when individual projects end.
Sustainability will not come from individual projects alone. It requires realistic scoping, shared infrastructure, open standards, and funders willing to support maintenance alongside production. Without these conditions, immersive journalism risks becoming a cycle of isolated experiments — rich in insight, poor in reach, and short-lived in impact. Longevity is not merely a technical concern. It is a journalistic one. Taken together, the challenges outlined above — from emotional design and data governance to platform dependency and institutional fragility — point to the need for a more integrated approach. Rather than treating ethics, impact, and sustainability as separate domains, immersive journalism requires a shared values framework that can guide everyday production decisions.
Toward a Values-Centered Framework for Immersive Journalism
Across newsrooms and audience sessions, the same tensions surfaced repeatedly — between emotion and understanding, innovation and sustainability, participation and control. Out of these conversations emerged five practical priorities for translating ethical intent into everyday production.
Accountability by Design: In VR, editorial decisions are embedded in environments through camera placement, sound, navigation, and reconstruction. Accountability requires making these judgments visible inside immersive experiences. Newsrooms experimented with in-experience markers and companion reporting to clarify what was documented versus modeled, while also confronting the need for clear institutional responsibility when harm occurs.
Audience Care as Production Practice: Immersion intensifies emotional exposure. Audiences wanted connection, but also agency: the ability to pause, exit, and regulate how deeply they engaged. Treating audience care as a production responsibility meant building content warnings, emotional exit points, and user control into experiences from the outset — especially in trauma-related reporting — rather than relying on post-hoc disclaimers. Journalists also noted the emotional labor placed on creators themselves, underscoring the need for trauma-aware design practices.
Impact Beyond Engagement: Downloads and headset time measure attention, not understanding. Across audience sessions in this study, meaningful impact appeared less in immediate emotional reaction than in what followed immersion: participants asked structural questions, debated policy implications, and discussed possible next steps. Experiences that minimized emotional steering were more likely to prompt reflection and sustained dialogue. In this context, impact is better assessed through post-experience discussions, surveys, classroom use, or community partnerships that capture what people learn and how perspectives shift.
Planning for Longevity from Day One: Most VR projects disappear after launch. Sustainability requires treating immersive journalism as infrastructure rather than spectacle, with attention to maintenance, documentation, and migration. Some teams addressed this by designing modular environments, sharing workflows, and integrating VR into everyday editorial processes to prevent institutional forgetting. For smaller newsrooms this often meant realistic scoping and partnerships; for larger organizations, dedicated teams and long-term platform strategies. Durable immersive journalism depends on shared responsibility across newsrooms, funders, platforms, and educators.
Values in Relationship
The dimensions explored in this article do not operate in isolation. Accountability builds trust. Care shapes impact. Inclusion deepens responsibility. Longevity makes any of it matter. When one is missing, immersive journalism becomes emotionally powerful but structurally fragile. Together, these priorities move immersive journalism from technological novelty toward responsible public practice. Across newsrooms and audience sessions, the same lesson surfaced repeatedly: immersive journalism finds its value not in how real it feels, but in how thoughtfully it is designed — how transparently it communicates editorial choices, how carefully it treats audiences, how inclusively it is produced, and how sustainably it is maintained.
Ioanna Georgia Eskiadi
Ioanna Georgia Eskiadi is a Ph.D. candidate in Journalism and Mass Communication at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a researcher at the Peace Journalism Laboratory. Her work focuses on immersive journalism and emerging technologies, including XR, artificial intelligence, and the metaverse, with an emphasis on ethics, audience impact, and sustainability. She has contributed to EU- and NATO-funded projects on disinformation, media literacy, and crisis communication, and her research has been published in leading international journals. She is a research fellow alumna of the NATO 2030 Global Fellowship and the Portulans Institute.
Affiliation: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
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