Gamergate, fragmentary storytelling, and news narrative: Convergence, ‘conversation’, and context in journalism education

Fragments of conversation dominate contemporary media. These conversations occur in the form of comments, sound bites, tweets, and commentary on social media platforms. In this context, it is hard to make sense of an issue. Telling stories has always been a way for people to make sense of the world, but there is a difference in the way storytelling occurs in conversation and long-form narrative. Despite the tension between both forms of storytelling, there is a space for both in contemporary media, but incorporating understanding of conversational storytelling is rare in journalism education. In 2014, 'gamergate' as an issue dominated the gaming mediasphere in a way that highlighted how conversational voices on social media became 'news' in a more traditional narrative sense. As an issue, #gamergate was unique in the length of time it remained current (over three months) in specialist and general media, and it demonstrated the appropriation of the story in an ongoing way by a community of citizen and specialist journalists. In considering the way mainstream media was marginalised as the issue developed, this paper considers #gamergate as a case study and argues there are lessons learned for journalism educators in identifying what should be privileged when teaching storytelling that can help make sense of fragments in digital contexts.