Literary journalism’s potential to create a transmedia world

The notion of transmedia storytelling was first introduced in the field of fictional narratives, referring to a “process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” (Jenkins 2006, 95-96). It soon spread to other fields, such as journalism (Gambarato and Alzamora 2018), where it is used either at the scale of a specific project, like the coverage of an election campaign or a sporting event, or at the scale of a global strategy in a media or a media company. Such transmedia journalism “is characterized by the involvement of (1) multiple platforms, (2) content expansion, and (3) audience engagement” (Gambarato and Tárcia 2017) This paper explores how one specific news story—the discovery of Christopher McCandless’s body in a remote camp in Alaska in 1992—slowly expanded into what can be called a transmedia world, even though this expansion was not planned nor coordinated. The paper describes how the construction of this narrative world indeed follows the principles of transmedia storytelling as defined by Jenkins (2009a, 2009b): spreadability vs. drillability, continuity vs. multiplicity, immersion vs. extractability, worldbuilding, seriality, subjectivity, and performance. This expansion from news story to transmedia world, the paper argues, was made possible because author Jon Krakauer became interested in the story and wrote two works of literary journalism about it: “Death of an innocent” (1993), an article for Outside magazine, and his famous book Into the Wild (1996). These pieces of literary journalism provided full, vivid, and emotionally charged accounts of McCandless’s story. They had such a strong impact and resonance that others—writers, moviemakers, witnesses or even just “fans”—felt compelled to expand Krakauer’s narrative into a larger and richer world, dispersed across different media and highly engaging for audiences.