Within the first group, we have studied their date, length, distribution platform, theme, main purpose, secondary purpose and scope of the information. The second group includes a series of narrative resources that contribute to generate in the viewer a sense of presence, that is, a “sensation of being inside the virtual environment indicated by the way of responding to it as if it were real” (Slater, et al., 2009: 200). This concept has been examined by several authors to analyze the human response in virtual environments (Lanier, 1992, Steuer, 1992: 104, Heeter, 1992: 262, Lombard & Ditton, 1997, Lee, 2004: 32). However, there is still no consensus in its definition (Lombard & Ditton, 1997; Schuemie, et al., 2001), and sometimes it has even been confused with the idea of immersion (Witmer & Singer, 1998; McMahan, 2003; Brown & Cairns, 2004). To avoid ambiguities, in this work we will refer to immersion as an objective property of a system that can be evaluated from a series of parameters. Presence, however, would be the subjective human response to said system (Slater, et al., 2009: 195; Sánchez Vives and Slater, 2005: 333). In this way, “presence” corresponds to a perceptual experience, while “immersion” corresponds to the objective property of a system that can be measured independently of the human experience it provides (Sánchez-Vives and Slater, 2005 and Slater, et al., 2009: 195).

In the same way that the concept of presence has not reached an agreement, neither have the different techniques carried out for its measurement (Ijsselsteijn, 2002; Sánchez-Vives & Slater, 2005). Overall, presence has been measured by reception studies through questionnaires applied to participants, during or after, an experience of presence. Regarding journalism, reception studies have also been carried out to measure the response of the audience after exposure to immersive narratives (Grassi, Giaggioli & Riva, 2008) and, more recently, to 360º video content (Jones & Callaghan, 2016; McRoberts, 2017; Jones, 2017; Archer & Finger, 2018).

Despite the lack of consensus regarding its measurement, three factors seem to be critical to cause sense of presence: media form, media content and user characteristics (Lombard & Ditton, 1997; Ijsselsteijn et al., 2000: 3960). Media form relates to the technical properties of the equipment. Media content relates to the contents and user characteristics having to do with to the disposition, knowledge and experience of users when exposing themselves to this type of narrative. The impact of the latter, generally obtained through reception studies has been criticized due to the intervention of some subjective factors that decrease their reliability (Diemer, et al., 2015: 5). Despite this, we consider them to still be important to the development of this type of narrative.

Within the second group, and following Domínguez (2017: 4), we will approach our study from the perspective of the factors related to the content and not taking as much into account the technological system that has been used. Briefly, the 3 formal characteristics of immersive 360º video features are:

i) It represents a realistic spherical scenario. This requires the disappearance of devices that can imply a loss in the fidelity of the representation. Among them:

a. The figure of the journalist and the recording team. When they are not erased, the viewer sees them located right in the scene, which can break its realism.

b. Any form of editing, since it also evidences the mediation (Men, et al., 2017: 286). In this sense, using sequence shot brings fluidity. This same spatial continuity guarantees that the represented temporality matches the (supposedly) real one (Casetti & Di Chio, 2007: 157).