Introduction

One of the key ways in which media firms and professionals can approach the convergence of media production and consumption cultures is through telling stories across multiple media. Transmedia production involves the creation of a storyworld employing different media for different parts of the story, each with their own objectives. It means that each part of the story is developed by employing a specific medium most suitable for that part of the narrative. All parts of the story may share some common pattern that unifies the creation of this narrative universe, and in some cases certain pieces of content may even be repeated throughout.

Transmedia is different from crossmedia (a story that runs across different media), and from multimedia (a story that uses different media). It differs from multimedia and crossmedia in that it creates a world, a universe, where the story is constructed like a puzzle of which each part is independent and can be consumed on its own. The audience plays a fundamental role in this construction, having to navigate the storyworld themselves and in doing so participating in the creation of it. Media production and specifically transmedia production requires in-depth reflection about the ecologies and semiotics of each medium as well as their interconnection. In the economy of attention, choosing the best medium for a story, or for a part of the overall story puzzle, demands both.

Media makers started to experiment and incorporate different media in the context of converging media industries (Pavlick & McIntosh, 2013) and the possibilities engendered by digitalization. Storytelling concepts such as multimedia, crossmedia, and transmedia help to explain the transformations in the production dynamics of the industry (Lee & Yong Jin, 2018). In these processes, the role of the audience has increased at different levels, and across different industries (Tosoni et al., 2017; Witschge et al., 2017).