The New Humanitarian is a global online publication that covers the humanitarian sector, focusing on international aid and development. It is the successor to IRIN News, which was launched by the United Nations in 2015 and relaunched as The New Humanitarian in 2021.
Across the globe, humanitarian agencies are grappling with complex emergencies that combine conflict, displacement, malnutrition and climate change. These situations can be difficult for donors to understand and fund. They are also increasingly characterized by protracted crises, which often render humanitarian aid operations more difficult and expensive.
A growing number of humanitarian organisations are experimenting with immersive journalism and virtual reality to engage viewers and enhance the impact of their work. This study focuses on the use of these tools by six well-known humanitarian organizations and examines how they leverage the potential of these new storytelling platforms to reach their audience.
The majority of the immersive videos analysed in this study focus on migration and its consequences (75.7%), with refugees and displaced people represented in the vast majority of the productions, such as We Are Rohingya (Medecins Sans Frontieres) or Ali’s Story. A smaller percentage of the videos address specific challenges, such as the cholera crisis in Ethiopia (Ali’s Story) or arranged marriage (The View from the Mountain). In contrast, climate change is present in only 10.8% and wildlife in 5.4% of the video productions analysed. These results are in line with the hypothesis that immersive journalism could facilitate empathetic engagement with these stories and increase empathy towards the events, people and places depicted in them.