Convergent journalism constitutes a systematic investigation into emergent journalistic forms, conceptual frameworks, and practices emerging within media convergence context, characterized by its inherent attributes of convergence, data-centricity, and interactivity. Grounded in the theoretical discourse of digital narratology, this monograph crystallizes its analytical focus on the triadic conceptual constellation of “convergence,” “mediaticity,” and “narrativity”. By positioning “convergence” as the central problematique, it systematically constructs an epistemological framework for convergent journalistic narrative through three dimensions: narrative theory, narrative language, and narrative praxis, thereby elucidates the ontological foundations and operational logics intrinsic to contemporary journalism studies. The theoretical framework is predicated upon a multilayered intertextual relational network spanning fundamental categories of convergent journalism narratology. This framework articulates six core dialectical dimensions: the intertextual dynamics between story epistemology and journalistic narrative connotation, the interplay of image-text semiotics within journalistic narrative language, the techno-discursive synthesis of digital rhetoric in journalistic narrative mechanisms, the reconfigurative process of remediation shaping journalistic narrative schemata, the critical hermeneutics of digital humanities applied to journalistic narrative criticism, the ethical entanglement between semiotic order and journalistic narrative ethics. This monograph synthesizes interdisciplinary research paradigms and mixed-methods approaches, employing an integrated methodology of critical discourse analysis and comparative case studies to systematically elucidate three constitutive dynamics: the dynamic coupling mechanisms between narrative affordance  and media materiality  in digital ecosystems, the deconstructive effects of remediation processes on traditional narrative paradigms, the dialectical tensions between techno-ethical governance  and semiotic power structures. As an innovative theoretical intervention in digital communication studies, Narrative of Convergent Journalism achieves paradigmatic breakthroughs across three dimensions: on epistemological innovative dimension, reconstructing cognitive frameworks for digital news storytelling through narrative cybernetics; on methodological advancement dimension, formulating a pragmatic knowledge system encompassing multimodal narrative grammars, transmedia storyworld construction, and AI-driven communication ethics; on the dimension of axiological contribution, establishing an innovation evaluation matrix  for journalistic narratives grounded in China’s sociocultural technoscape. This research paradigm provides dual analytical frameworks: value Rationality for interpreting narrative transformations in digital media ecologies and instrumental rationality for operationalizing culturally-situated narrative assessment criteria. Ultimately, through constructing culturally agentic evaluation standards, the work delivers actionable pathways for advancing China’s discursive practices within global communication governance frameworks.

I

Digital narrative constitutes a mediatized story fundamentally predicated upon the mediaticity of digital media (Lundby, 2008, pp.363-371). Mediation technologies have fundamentally reconfigured the forms and languages of journalistic storytelling, catalyzing the emergence of convergent journalism as a novel narrative paradigm through the strategic deployment of visualization technologies, interactivity, and AI-driven intelligence. This monograph employs narrative affordance as its conceptual apparatus to systematically construct the theoretical framework of convergent journalism narratology, organized through six cardinal theoretical propositions: story epistemology within the connotative dimension of narrative, semiotic interplay of image and text within the linguistic dimension of narrative, digital rhetoric within the dimension of narrative mechanisms, remediation within the dimension of narrative schemata, digital humanities within the dimension of narrative criticism, the symbolic order within the dimension of narrative ethics.

This monograph, within the theoretical framework of digital narratology, reveals the dual reconstruction mechanisms of convergent journalism narratives in reshaping storytelling across spatiotemporal dimensions. At the temporal level, the ontological reconstruction of narrative cognition manifests as a paradigmatic shift in temporal schemata, where temporality undergoes a topological turn in narrative construction. The sequential logic of narratives, through re-encoding by data algorithms, evolves into a nonlinear, interactive composite structure. At the spatial level, the embodied practices of media technologies engender the generative characteristics of narrative spaces. The spatial dimension, through the intervention of media materiality, evolves into an embodied narrative syntax system. This spatiotemporal reconstruction paradigm collectively operates on digital news narrative mechanisms, compelling narrative production mechanisms to adhere to dual regulatory frameworks: a data-driven cognitive framework and the operational logic of human-computer interaction. Ultimately, this achieves the topological construction of the storyworld. In reconstructing language-image relationships, convergent journalism texts—as multimodal constructs fundamentally composed of linguistic and visual modal elements—focus on two representative narrative modalities: juxtaposed narrative with choreographic language and embedded narrative with schematic language. By incorporating the perspective of material analysis, the discussion innovatively examines the language-image dynamics and semiotic structures within the “vertical screen” interface format, ultimately establishing a guided interface narrative paradigm.

Convergent journalism narratives investigate digital-text-oriented rhetorical conceptions, forms, and practices through four foundational dimensions of rhetoric: its ontological nature, syntactic grammar, contextual situatedness, and performative effects. The interface architecture of convergent journalism enables user participation in narrative construction predicated on self-determined selection, thereby operationalizing invitational rhetoric as a discursive framework. This mechanism cultivates enhanced social belonging among users through co-constitutive narrative engagement. The rhetorical principles of interactive narrative operate through three constitutive mechanisms: procedural configuration mechanisms at the narrative rule stratum, spatiotemporal manipulation mechanisms at the narrative structural stratum, and plot decision-making mechanisms at the narrative pathway stratum. The situational rhetorical modalities of convergent journalism leverage audiovisual technologies to reconstitute socially dimensional issue scenarios, employ digital technologies to simulate the actual environments of news events, and achieve concurrent presentation of occurrences’ external contextual frameworks and factual essences through synthesized integration of virtual-real spatial constructs. In summation, digital media technologies possess the capacity to synthesize virtual-real spatial constructs, thereby reproducing or reconstructing corresponding rhetorical scenarios—including socially dimensional issue scenarios, actual environments of news occurrences, and external contextual frameworks of events. Through the strategic creation of narrative situations, technical simulation of journalistic sites, and innovative reconfiguration of hybrid contexts, convergent journalism narratives fundamentally restructure the metalinguistic system governing textual semantic perception at the situational dimension.

Within the techno-cultural context of emerging technologies, data cloud mapping has expanded the imaginative and participatory capacities of affect, precipitating an affective turn within digital journalism. Convergent journalism generates affective signification at the textual-story dimension through emotionally charged narrative design and expressive articulation. Within this dimensional framework of affective rhetoric, digital interaction technologies operationalize dual mechanisms: the creation of affect-laden spatial constructs, and the endowment of users with narrative selection agency and plot decision-making authority. These mechanisms collectively facilitate user emotional immersion through co-creative engagement with the storyworld. The affective rhetoric of convergent journalism narratives further manifests through the deployment of remote sensing technologies, haptic technologies, and interactive modalities to expand the sensory dimensions of journalistic representation and interaction, thereby enhancing users’ affective engagement within experiential scenario frameworks. Through technologically-enabled innovations in textual storytelling and immersive environment design, convergent journalism extends the affective vectors of news narratives, constructing a reality apprehension paradigm fundamentally grounded in affective identification.

The remediated narrative language of convergent journalism manifests through emerging media typified by smartphones, which assimilate, appropriate, and reconfigure legacy media’s semiotic systems and medial logics across three constitutive dimensions: material properties, formal configurations, and cultural attributes. At the medial morphology stratum, this remediation process materializes as convergent journalism’s expansion of narrative presentational modalities through direct appropriation of alternative media forms. When multiple media forms become constitutive elements within the representational structure of convergent journalism, remediation practices reconstruct new spatiotemporal exhibition logics and information articulation frameworks, thereby expanding the narrative topology of journalistic works. For instance, the cinematic grammar within remediated narratives generates innovative narrative configurations, the cartographic grammar’s remediation fundamentally restructures data relationships underlying reality, while ludic grammar’s remediation practices extend the conceptual and methodological horizons of convergent journalism storytelling. Within the media grammar dimension, remediation manifests as convergent journalism’s appropriation and assimilation of narrative languages from alternative media forms to expand the representational architectures of journalistic storytelling. In the media imagery dimension, remediation materializes through convergent journalism’s strategic integration of cultural-conventional attributes—particularly media imagery systems rooted in cultural-metaphorical frameworks—from other media, thereby augmenting the semiotic strata and symbolic systems operative within news narratives. In summation, digital media narratives engage in remediation practices through the assimilation, appropriation, and synthesis of traditional media’s representational forms, narrative languages, technological logics, and cultural significations. Within convergent journalism’s remediated storytelling framework, at the medial morphology stratum, convergent journalism innovates information presentation modalities through elemental integration frameworks; at the media grammar stratum, it expands narrative structures, relational dynamics, and rule systems via informational encoding restructuration; at the media imagery stratum, it establishes cognitive foundations for cultural identification and embeds symbolic resonances through cultural-semiotic scaffolding.

In the new media epoch, convergent journalism narratives must foreground ethical considerations and their underlying semiotic orders. This monograph interrogates the signifying mechanisms and corresponding narrative ethics within meaning-generation dimensions through four analytical vectors: journalistic ontology, constitutive elements, discursive languages, and production modalities. The ethical exploration of convergent journalism narratives necessitates confronting challenges arising from technological applications that problematize journalistic veracity, morphologically evolving news forms that destabilize professional boundaries, and value-orientation paradigms that reconfigure news valuation frameworks, while simultaneously seeking resolution pathways for issues encompassing data reliability in news production, the epistemic authenticity of data relationships, and the systemic privacy violations embedded within data manufactures. Furthermore, ethical implications surrounding visualization ethics of presentational modes, representational ethics in data visualization, and digital remediation ethics must be rigorously examined, as well as systemic ethical challenges inherent to algorithmic curation of news dissemination, computational design paradigms of recommendation systems, and automated content generation mechanisms within robotic journalism. The core ethical problematic of convergent journalism narratives manifests through four dimensional imperatives: information ethics at the ontological stratum concerning narrative substance, data ethics at the elemental stratum addressing constitutive components, visual ethics at the linguistic stratum governing representational modalities, and technological ethics at the productive stratum regulating operational frameworks. Information ethics engages in boundary demarcation of journalistic epistemology to interrogate narrative content while responding to semiotic configuration challenges; data ethics centers on privacy security as its axiological nucleus to negotiate narrative elements through addressing semiotic language systems; technological ethics revolves around value-laden assessments of techno-agency to critique narrative formations while confronting semiotic values. Future ethical discourse on convergent journalism narratives must persistently foreground ethical vectors encompassing journalistic valuation frameworks, professional codification standards, public interest imperatives, individual rights preservation, and value-orientation paradigms, while rigorously adhering to the semiotic order governing profound meaning production and interpretation through narrative ontology’s logical structures, formal stratum’s symbolic boundary regimes, linguistic dimension’s translation rules, and representational layer’s conventional systems.

II

Building upon the systematic construction of convergent journalism narratology’s theoretical framework, this monograph undertakes a multidimensional investigation into the formal configurations and discursive languages of convergent journalism narratives across temporal, spatial, auditory, interactive, and affective dimensions, while concurrently engaging with media technologies to analyze the interface scales, linguistic repertoires, and cultural codifications inherent to vertical screen narratives, ultimately interrogating the embeddedness of mediatic essence within narrativity as a fundamental theoretical problematic.

 Underpinned by digital technologies, convergent journalism has data-driven foundations that unlock polyvalent narrative tenses while expanding the spatiotemporal boundaries of chronological storytelling. Digital narratives innovate multifarious temporal morphologies through the deep embeddedness of hyperlinking technologies and visualization technologies. Through visualization rhetoric practices, the temporal trajectories of convergent journalism materialize as concretized visual schemata, while narrative structures transmute into imagistic constructs that become semiotically apprehensible and hermeneutically navigable via the operational logics of visualization languages. Concurrently, the organizational structure of hyperlinks introduces synchronicity into temporal trajectories, thereby rendering convergent journalism narratives as nested logical architectures. While visualized spatiotemporal structures engender emergent journalistic argumentation languages through visualization grammars, this nested chronologic transcends unidirectional representational modalities, evolving towards multidimensional, composite, and topological nested configurations that reconfigure narrative epistemology through polydimensional semiotic operations. Within the visual rhetoric framework of data visualization, the epistemic subject of convergent journalism cultivates historical temporal consciousness through data variance and comparative analysis, constructing data-driven temporal schemata; engenders processual temporal flux awareness through spatial kinetics, formulating spatialized temporal schemata; and develops mnemonic temporal imaginary through semiotic simulation and appropriation, establishing semiotically codified temporal schemata—these tripartite dimensions collectively constitute nested, networked, topological, and future-oriented temporal schemata that reconfigure chrono-epistemology through multi-scalar semiotic operations.

In constructing spatial narrative dimensions, convergent journalism narratology operates through four constitutive frameworks: mimetic representation of reality, structural schemata configuration, cognitive mediation, and agentive praxis paradigms. Technological innovations in media forms such as animation, VR systems, and mobile live-streaming revolutionize journalistic scenography through virtual reconstruction, panoramic reconstruction, and holistic reconstruction of news environments, thereby establishing innovative mimetic narrative modalities that reconfigure spatial epistemology through multi-layered techno-semiotic operations. The structural schemata of spatial narratives are architected through the modular characteristics of digital media and multimodal convergence attributes of convergent journalism, employing procedural rhetoric to engender concatenated and juxtaposed spatial organizational structures that systematically organize and arrange journalistic informational elements according to spatial dispositifs, thereby constructing schematic formal structures which manifest as open, interactive, and navigable spatial configurations facilitating immersive participatory engagement through cognitively mapped navigational affordances. The spatial narrative as subjective praxis, empowered by digital technologies, reinvents the contextual language of physical spaces and thereby expands the digital experiences of subjects within real-world environments, while the deep integration of virtual and real scenarios engenders a hybrid form of subjective experientiality. Additionally, the soundscape in convergent journalism materializes as sonic narratives functioning through factual presentation, symbolic signification, and data-driven reconfiguration, which collectively unveil novel cognitive dimensions through their epistemic rearticulation of perceptual frameworks.

The breakthroughs of convergent journalism narratives across temporal, spatial, and auditory dimensions advance their interactive orientations with reading subjects, expanding potential dimensions of bidirectional communication, while interactivity is recognized as one of the defining principles of data journalism (Usher, 2020, p.27), fundamentally reshaping epistemic frameworks through its capacity to mediate perceptual hierarchies and reconfigure subject-object relationalities within digitally augmented information ecosystems. Through the mediating function of interface devices, which operationalize users’ participatory modalities within the storyworld, the interactive agent selects narrative progression through pathway interaction, constructs plot developments through plot interaction, and perceives narrative environments through environmental interaction, thereby dynamically reconfiguring the hermeneutic parameters of digital storytelling systems. Marie-Laure Ryan (2014, pp.18-19) articulates that media technologies and their corresponding semiotic properties inherently possess diverse potentialities to reconfigure, restructure, or innovate narrative relations. The interactive narrative of convergent journalism reconstitutes the discursive system of journalistic storytelling across multiple strata including textual content, structural form, and communicative vectors. Its path configurations and fabricated possible worlds innovate the semiotic generation of narrative meaning through procedural rhetoric, thereby forging novel paradigms of information production. In the realm of plot construction, the interactive narrative of convergent journalism investigates the mechanisms of interactive engagement governing the spatiotemporal dimensions of narrative development. Through the reconfiguration and reimagination of temporal logics and spatial architectures within storylines, the interactive apparatuses of convergent journalism construct heterogeneous storyworlds and reconfigure narrative plots, thereby generating an “interactive dimensionality” within narrative chronotopes. The narrative breakthroughs in spatiotemporal dimensions actualize interactive storytelling between humans and environments. Digital technologies furnish users with novel experiential modalities, thereby endowing the connections among space, place, and narrative with renewed formal configurations and conceptual profundity (Ryan et al., 2016, pp.101-137).  The widespread proliferation of emerging technologies such as locative media, digital radar, and augmented reality within the digital sphere has engendered a series of novel interfacial apparatuses, thereby inaugurating a “geographical turn” in narratology that equips subjects with cross-modal synesthetic experiences within concrete environmental contexts, profoundly amplifying the interactive capacities of convergent journalism. This deep interpenetration of virtual-physical scenarios constructs a cognitively revolutionary “embodied-disembodied” dual paradigm of cognition, redefining perceptual engagement through its dialectical synthesis of corporeal presence and digital abstraction.

Interactive technologies, serving as the catalytic mechanism for the digital turn in narratology, have actualized an epistemological shift from classical narratology’s “unidirectional transmission” paradigm to convergent narrative’s “intersubjective” dialogic structures through their restructuring of journalistic communication’s media ecology, thereby reconfiguring the ontological parameters of narrative production and reception within digitally mediated environments. This technologically-driven narrative revolution simultaneously instigates a reconfiguration of affective dimensions within the journalistic ecosystem, where, grounded in a cognitive-semiotic framework, the affective production mechanisms of convergent journalism execute their rhetorical praxis through the triadic interplay among data-driven, interactive, and contextual modalities, thereby marking a paradigmatic rupture in digital journalism’s affective narrative stratum from traditional rhetorical theories, reconceptualizing the interplay between technological mediation and emotive discourse construction. Data cloud mapping constructs affective dimensions through visual frameworks and symbolic imagery in data-driven contexts, while procedural affective imagination amplifies subjects’ emotional engagement within interactive modalities. The digital scenarios engineered by media technologies aesthetically expand the imaginative capacities of affective narratives via techno-aesthetic reconfigurations of digital landscapes, thereby rearticulating embodied emotional experiences through scenographic production grounded in embodied logics. The affective narrative and epistemic production of convergent journalism, by virtue of visualization technologies and grounded in procedural rhetoric, construct digital mechanisms for affective storytelling through data-driven, interactive, and scenographic dimensions. This innovative affective narrative paradigm remains inextricably contingent upon the novel convergent media narrative system engendered through vertical-screen interface-mediated interactions between subjects and media apparatuses; wherein emergent participatory architectures and engagement logics co-evolve with techno-discursive formations. Vertical-screen culture as a form of convergent culture is exemplified through participatory practices in user behaviors and transmedia storytelling in informational content. This monograph’s sustained analytical focus on affective narratives in convergent journalism reveals the author’s profound engagement with the techno-ethical inquiry of “how technologies condition affective dimensions,” not only demonstrating the theoretical depth of media ethics scholarship but also foregrounding humanistic scholars’ adherence to value rationality and disciplinary reflexivity within technology-dominated communication ecologies.

III

Building upon the theoretical framework of convergent journalistic narratology established in this monograph, the text conducts a praxiological analysis of contemporary Chinese journalistic discourse practices, interrogating the “convergent journalistic paradigm” for constructing China’s discursive system through the synthesis of uniquely Chinese convergence logics, modalities, formal configurations, and semiotic systems, thereby forging an autonomous knowledge system for Chinese convergent journalistic narratology via dialogic engagement with global news systems while maintaining epistemological specificity rooted in localized media praxis. This monograph posits that conceptual advancement necessitates the activation and appropriation of prototypical concepts to globally introduce novel conceptualizations capable of articulating Chinese particularities, thereby constructing journalistic narrative models with Chinese-international discursive compatibility. Such activation and appropriation proceed through grounding in contemporaneous political praxis to reinterpret, excavate, and hermeneutically elaborate the significations of traditional cultural discourses, transforming them into intellectual resources for current Chinese political practices, which subsequently enables the establishment of a Chinese hermeneutic framework for conducting international dialogues premised on Chinese-international discursive synthesis. The activation of traditional cultural concepts necessitates articulating China’s stories through convergent journalistic narrative practices across four coordinated dimensions—factual exposition, imagistic representation, affective articulation, and rational argumentation—thereby crystallizing novel discursive formulations for the construction of China’s discursive system through this quadripartite framework of narrative engagement. In terms of content, it is imperative to maximize the distinctive advantages of heterogeneous media elements in factual representation; in formal expression and narrative discourse, innovation should be pursued through vivid audiovisual semiotics and interactive modalities; regarding affective interaction, public cognitive resonance can be cultivated via the remediation and scenographic construction of narrative situations; at the axiological level, strategic emphasis must be placed on the paradigmatic breakthroughs of convergent journalistic narratives in knowledge production and value systems, thereby reconfiguring epistemic hierarchies through mediated discursive practices. In summation, China’s narrative system must be grounded in the theoretical basis of digital storytelling, conjoined with concrete international communication imperatives, to systematically construct a digital narrative framework for “tell China’s stories well” across morphological, semantic, and communicative strata, thereby operationalizing discursive synthesis through stratified technical-aesthetic interventions in global information flows.

 Convergent journalistic narrative situates textual narrative inquiries within the communicative matrices of the digital epoch, constructing the epistemic architecture and digital praxis frameworks for China’s narrative system through textual performativity. Within deeply mediatized digital contexts, the configuration of China’s narrative architecture necessitates confronting the material logics and expressive modalities of emergent textualities while interrogating the narrative turn in textual representation alongside its formal logics. The narrative turn can be examined through the visual turn in semiotic manifestation, the affective turn in semantic rhetoric, and the ludic turn in scenographic construction. The grammatical logic of convergent journalism is architected through triadic dimensions of narrative operation: imagistic articulation, affective modulation, and interactive engagement, thereby synthesizing multimodal semiosis through these stratified yet interdependent pathways of techno-discursive mediation. In the convergent journalistic narratology of China’s discursive system, the construction of national data discourse power has assumed novel practical configurations. At the operational stratum, this monograph elucidates China’s narrative system through transmedia narrative systems while investigating the operational logics underlying Chinese story articulation via textual performativity. Grounded in the narrative nesting, transmediation, and intermedial synergy facilitated by intermediality, convergent journalistic narrative responds to the intertextual construction of “tell China’s stories well” through its operational logics, thereby materializing discursive sovereignty via techno-semiotic negotiations within globally networked information ecologies.

This monograph further employs a visual rhetorical framework to analyze the construction of China’s image within Western data journalism through five interconnected micro-rhetorical practices: data curation, relationality mapping, temporal schematization, spatial projection, and interactive mediation. Thereby, the convergent journalistic narrative system exposes strategies of “causal displacement” within data chains and “temporal politics” in chronographic regimes, constructs “neo-geographic narratives” through cartographic reimagination, and advocates for national image reconfiguration via “data stories + visual imagination”—synthesizing evidentiary poetics with techno-aesthetic interventions to counterbalance western hegemonic data epistemologies. The reconstruction of national image through journalistic narratives on the international stage necessitates anchoring in convergent journalistic modalities epitomized by data journalism, centering on the visual crises inherent in China’s contemporary imagological construction, while interrogating the data-driven mechanisms of crisis generation alongside counteractive visual rhetorical logics and their innovative narrative framework pathways, thereby architecting narrative schemata for data discourse power construction. This monograph advocates for actualizing the modern transformation of discursive systems through pathways encompassing the construction of semantic networks as exemplified by the visual semiotization of the “Community of Shared Future for Mankind”, and the reconfiguration of cognitive paradigms as epitomized by the spatial narrativization of “the Belt and Road”, thereby operationalizing metadiscursive innovation through the dialectical synthesis of symbolic codification and geopolitical storytelling within transcultural communication ecologies. Furthermore, the construction of ecological civilization discourses within digital narrative systems constitutes a critical theoretical imperative; addressing this necessitates unleashing the imaginative potential of environmental issue representation and storytelling through four operational vectors: the discovery of digital representations and ecological controversies, the reconfiguration of digital landscapes and eco-aesthetic paradigms, the reinvention of digital interactions and ecological scenarios, and the innovation of digital participation in eco-writing practices, thereby architecting a journalistic narrative framework consonant with contemporary ecological contexts through the techno-discursive mediation of nature-culture dialectics in hypermediated environments.

Convergent journalistic narrative injects new vitality into the inheritance and innovation of traditional culture; through synthesizing imagistic, affective, and ludic dimensions across narrative morphogenesis, perceptual modalities, and generative mechanisms, it explores the conjunctive pathways between cultural narratability and technological plasticity. Digital storytelling facilitates the infusion and transcoding of diverse iconographic texts into traditional cultural frameworks via visualization techniques, thereby reconfiguring the visual vectors of conceptual schemata, conscious formations, and semiotic configurations within cultural systems, ultimately crystallizing novel narrative morphologies through techno-discursive negotiations between ancestral memory and algorithmic recomposition. Through the convergence of rational and affective languages, digital narrative systems activate affective interactional spaces between human and nonhuman actants, thereby augmenting narrative perception through hermeneutic engagement with multimodal semiosis. The underlying ludic logics of situatedness, immersivity, and playfulness engender novel semiotic significations within traditional cultural storytelling through generative mechanisms of cultural reimagining. In the temporal-axis interpretative schema, the logical context provided by convergent journalism for cultural events reveals the processes of generation, perpetuation, transformation, and alternation between material culture and mental culture. Within the spatial-situated perceptual dimension, the three-dimensional visual environments simulated by virtual reality technology construct simulacrum-like, interactive journalistic narrative landscapes. Through such narrative construction, users can receive technologically-mediated emotional resonance via the “other-subject” life experiences, thereby achieving emotional interaction with traditional culture and narrative identification.

The study of convergent journalism narratology inevitably entails the exploration of human-machine collaborative storytelling. In the concluding section of this monograph, the author turns the gaze toward the future landscape of journalistic narratives shaped by human-computer collaboration, discussing the roles and functions of artificial intelligence within convergent journalism narratives, while providing an outlook on the emerging “intelligent turn” in narrative practices.

In summary, nonlinear, multimodal, and interactive convergent journalism has emerged as the dominant form of contemporary news expression. As an emergent information form and digital practice in the omnimedia era, convergent journalism undertakes multifaceted social functions encompassing value guidance and social governance (Tao, 2021, p.17.). This monograph focuses on conducting narrative theoretical construction and practical exploration of this dominant journalistic form within contemporary technological contexts, not only expanding the knowledge system of journalism in the digital media era but also precisely embodying the discursive particularities and practices characteristic of current Chinese journalism. This monograph posits that digital rhetoric studies of convergent journalism narratives must extend into the dimension of rhetorical practice to systematically construct its digital rhetoric framework. How to maximally utilize the media properties and technological characteristics of digital technologies to expand the potential dimensions of affective rhetoric, thereby innovating digital affective mechanisms for social issues and actively participating in social governance system innovation, constitutes one of the critical challenges confronting the future development of convergent journalism narratology. Confronting the narrative crisis in contemporary international communication, convergent journalism narratives explore the cultural discursive pathway for the global dissemination of Chinese political discourse through semiotic innovation in international discourse content, framing innovation in international discourse structures, and expressive innovation in international discourse forms. The “convergent-journalism-as-method” Chinese narrative system constructed in this monograph not only demonstrates groundbreaking significance within domestic academia’s research domain of journalistic narrative theory, but also explores highly effective pathways for the international dissemination of China’s stories through this novel journalistic narrative framework.

References:

Lundby, K. (2008). Mediatized stories: Mediation perspectives on digital storytelling. New Media & Society, 10(3), 363-371.

Ryan, M.L. (2014). Avatars of Story (Z. Xinjun, Trans.). Nanjing: Yilin Press.

Ryan, M.L., Foote, K., & Azaryahu, M. (2016). Narrating space/spatializing narrative: Where narrative theory and geography meet. Columbus, OH.: The Ohio State University Press.

Tao, L. et al., (2021). Convergent Journalism. Beijing: Higher Education Press.

Usher, N. (2020). Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data and Code (G. Enqiang, Trans.). Beijing: Renmin University Press.