Stories that walk with you: opportunities in locative audio for feature journalism

This article investigates the potential for locative audio documentary walks to operate as a potent hyperlocal form of feature journalism. Locative audio walks combine digital interfaces and media with mobile and geo-locative technology to co-locate audiences and narrative with place and extend traditional journalistic understandings of proximity. It may be argued that faltering media economies have largely curtailed journalistic experimentation with locative technology. However, there is scope for journalists to use locative audio platforms to produce newsworthy, place-based feature journalism and documentary narratives. Such productions can provide space for narrative engagements with alternative and marginalised perspectives of events at particular locations. Several Australian locative audio walks are discussed as examples which could be considered to be journalistic audio features.