9. Interaction in Digital News Media: Trends, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

The binomial formed by interactivity and the digital news media has enabled us to tackle the study of interactive texts, the digital media and its ecosystem from a range of different perspectives. These different vantage points, moreover, offer a broad and complete overview of the complexity of contemporary communication, in which, often, the limits between emitters and receivers have become blurred, in which texts have acquired considerable dynamism and mutability, and where systems rather than analyzing, collecting, and managing information have become actors in their own right. All this has meant that ways of thinking about the media, in terms of its profitability and its need for legal protection, are in constant transformation and the subject of continuing debate. Interactivity is today an essential concept for understanding a media that is characterized by the constant flow of inputs and outputs from all the agents and actors that participate in it, exchanges that have come to define the media itself: the information that is transmitted, stored, and processed, and the processes that feed each other to offer a system that allows the user to experiment with and participate in the information as well as to form part of it.