Making News More LIke "Grand Theft Auto" | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it

As tech watchers debate the overuse of interactive tools in stories David Sarno says light interactive news stories don't go far enough. As a tech reporter at the Los Angeles Times David Sarno found himself frustrated that newspaper stories only engage “one lousy sense,” as he puts it. That would be sight.


Why couldn’t they be as interactive and entertaining as a video game like Grand Theft Auto, where a player can walk around a virtual city, drive a car, walk into a store (and, yes, kill people), and essentially have some control over a re-created reality?


Even when the iPad came out in 2010 (an event that Sarno prolifically covered for The Times) and made print media more touchable, Sarno wasn’t impressed. “At that time, and still largely today, what news organizations and magazines are doing is reproducing the print version on the screen,” he tells Fast Company. “It’s like two steps better than scanning in the print version and putting it on the iPad screen.”...