longform journalism
Longform journalism is a relatively recent name for a journalistic genre that goes by many names: literary journalism, narrative journalism, reportage, nonfiction, journalistic storytelling, and others. Stories of this format can be found in traditional publications such as newspapers, magazines, and books as well as on specialized online platforms such as longform.org or longreads.com, aggregators that curate stories from a variety of sources. The term longform emerged because some entrepreneurs and journalists were looking for a way to capture different kinds of nonfiction writing (e.g., narrative journalism, essays, historical documents, screenplays, book chapters) and make them available on tablets, mobile devices, and on the Web. While the label longform is new, however, the history of this genre goes back to the 19th century, and its characteristics both evolved and solidified over time.
The following entry uses the term narrative journalism because it better describes the constructed nature of this genre in that it emphasizes the combination of reporting (journalism) and narrative (aesthetic effects). Narrative journalism is a form of storytelling that relies on fact-based reporting and conveys information in the form of a story, foregrounding stylistic elements such as character, plot, descriptive detail, and point of view. The goal of narrative journalism is to create an immersive experience for readers, often eliciting strong emotions such as empathy and joy but potentially also outrage and disapproval. Whatever the actual intellectual and emotional engagement looks like, ultimately narrative journalism provides an opening for moral reflection.
It is important to note that the following discussion focuses on narrative journalism in the United States. While examples of longform storytelling in journalism can be found around the globe and illustrate a broad spectrum of journalistic and literary cultures, the genre of narrative journalism has a distinct American flavor and has become a standard to aspire to. Part of its success story in the United States is that, over time, a dense institutional and cultural network evolved, providing writers with incentives, best practices, and traditions to draw from as well as analog and digital platforms to publish on. That said, narrative journalism also has deep roots in Europe where its popularity ebbed and flowed over time. Moreover, the current media environment also created conditions for more and stronger international exchange among practitioners and scholars, leading to conferences and networks focused on the theory and practice of narrative journalism around the globe.
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This entry first offers a brief history of narrative journalism, sketching its evolution from the 19th century to the present. Then the discussion shifts to reporting techniques and the mechanisms of gathering facts, the building blocks of nonfiction stories. The next section examines how narrative journalism uses literary techniques to create an immersive experience for its readers. The concluding section focuses on the role and significance of longform narrative journalism in today’s media environment.
Brief History
Narrative journalism as a cultural phenomenon had its beginnings in the late 19th century and emerged in an era when literature and journalism were not yet entirely separated. In an age of accelerating industrialization, massive immigration and the nationalization of American life, journalism and literature turned their gaze to actual people and how they lived. It became important to describe the cities with their sights and sounds, social life in all its complexity and diversity. For instance, journalists and fiction writers were intrigued by the variety of immigrant lifestyles and often abysmal living conditions in urban neighborhoods. They were trying to make sense of the modern world, brought about by scientific innovation and economic expansion. Hutchins Hapgood and Jacob Riis were prominent examples of writers who ventured out as ethnographers and introduced a wider audience to the plight of the slums in New York City.
While early literary journalists such as Mark Twain and Stephen Crane easily switched between literature and journalism, the two fields were drifting apart by the early 20th century and journalism became its own professional practice with certain norms, values, and routines. As a result, literary techniques played a less prominent role for a while. Beginning in the 1930s, reporters began to see themselves as narrators again and advanced more subjective and interpretive forms of telling stories. Especially the New Yorker became a prime example of innovative writing, blending earlier literary trends of naturalism and realism. The magazine published a groundbreaking piece by John Hersey in 1946 when his story about the dropping of the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima filled an entire issue of the magazine. Another influential writer was Lillian Ross, who used literary techniques in her writings that ranged from profiles (e.g., about Ernest Hemingway) to the workings of big movie production.
Despite all these literary precursors, the reference point for most contemporary longform journalists is the so-called New Journalism of the 1960s. In the context of fundamental social, political, and cultural change, these journalists were applying literary techniques (cinematic writing, extended dialogue, point-of-view, and interior monologue) to journalistic works. Tom Wolfe, one of its earliest and most prominent proponents, argued that New Journalism offered readers not only a fully reported, objective description of events but also the subjective and emotional life of characters, characteristics that would typically be more common in novels and short stories but not in journalism. But not only the style of the New Journalists differed from regular news writing. These reporters were interested in subcultures (e.g., Hunter S. Thompson’s portrait of the Hell’s Angels), cultural trends (e.g., Joan Didion’s vignettes about California), the life of celebrities (e.g., Gay Talese’s profile of Frank Sinatra, which has been often described as the best piece of literary journalism in the 20th century), as well as close-up depictions of political events (e.g., Norman Mailer’s stories about the Democratic Convention in 1960 or the 1967 March on the Pentagon). Critics of the New Journalism alleged that its practitioners were mixing facts and fiction, undermining the truth claims of traditional journalism. However, as scholars pointed out time and again, the fluid character of narrative journalism has nothing to do with making things up but is rather a result of a range of literary elements that narrative journalists employ for the sake of enhancing the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual experience of nonfiction stories.
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While many literary journalists started out as newspaper reporters, they typically published their writing in magazines or books. Influenced by the work of these journalists, however, reporters and editors in U.S. newspapers began experimenting with narrative writing styles. The Washington Post was the first major newspaper that deliberately and systematically incorporated narrative techniques into its daily news production when it launched its Style section in 1969. During the 1970s, other newsrooms (e.g., Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer) were also experimenting with storytelling formats, but it was not until the end of that decade that the newspaper industry as such paid attention. In response to declining circulation numbers, the American Society for Newspaper Editors initiated efforts to improve writing and inaugurated writing awards in 1979. In the same year, feature writing was introduced as a category to the Pulitzer Prizes. By the 1980s, news organizations began pouring resources into the production of feature stories. They hired writing coaches, gave reporters more time to work on assignments, and expanded weekend editions by adding narrative stories. The Poynter Institute, then evolving as the country’s leading training center for mid-career journalists, became instrumental in promoting narrative writing at newspapers and, by the 1990s, other renowned training institutions such as the American Press Institute and universities (Harvard University, University of Missouri, Boston University) held workshops and conferences about the benefits of storytelling. By the beginning of the 21st century, a veritable storytelling movement had taken shape, expanding the genre in multidimensional ways across media and platforms.
The Art of Reporting
Before narrative journalists can employ literary techniques, they have to gather their material, which comes from thorough, in-depth, and often deeply personal reporting. To craft compelling stories, they have to develop specific research strategies and reporting techniques as well as cultivate self-reflexivity and emotional intelligence. Getting access to sources and earning their trust are the most important part because this determines whether a journalist will have opportunities to follow along for important events, take a look at personal documents, and ask probing questions. Since the emotional experience of characters is such an essential part of longform journalism, journalists have to negotiate the challenge of conducting intimate interviews with strangers they hardly know. They need to establish a bond quickly, assuring their interviewees that they truly care about their story. At the same time, reporters still have to do rigorous research and double-check information they have received. In addition, observation and being there when action is unfolding are key elements for impactful reporting, because gathering this kind of information allows reporters to craft dynamic scenes and evocative images. Narrative journalists often work like anthropologists or ethnographers, as they carefully record sensory information (what they see, hear, smell) and take detailed notes on what they observe happening around them. An extreme example of this kind of reporting is Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, who spent more than a decade reporting and writing her book Random Family, chronicling the life of a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx. Another demanding form of immersive reporting is going undercover. For his book Newjack, Ted Conover became a prison guard at Sing Sing in New York and captured life in prison from his personal perspective.
Narrative journalists use the whole arsenal of journalistic tools to gather information. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning story “Guantanamo’s Darkest Secret,” New Yorker reporter Ben Taub told the story of Mohamedou Salahi, who was falsely detained as a terrorist by the United States in Guantanamo Bay. Taub combines direct observation, interviews, diaries, and ample contextual reporting about the U.S. war on terror with a personal profile that illuminates the complexities and political miscalculations of American foreign interventions. In a similar vein, Hannah Dreier of ProPublica addressed a structural problem, gang violence, by profiling a former gang member who talked to law enforcement about escaping gang life only to be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and subsequently threatened by other gang members. She and her editors had to balance her source’s desire to tell his story with the threat to his life. The story “A Betrayal” was published in New York magazine without disclosing the character’s last name or showing his photo. Henry, the former gang member, wanted the story out and let Dreier read through years of messages on his phone. He also helped her make a glossary of Spanish gang slang so that it became possible for her to understand the coded text and voice messages he exchanged with other gang members. As this example shows, ethical challenges and moral decisions are intricate parts of reporting for narrative journalism.
The Craft of Writing
To create an immersive reading experience, narrative journalists use literary techniques and narrative conventions, stylistic effects that elicit aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual responses from readers. Consequently, these effects shape factual reporting material in distinct ways. A traditional news story answers the questions about who, what, where, when, why, and how. Narrative journalism takes each of these elements and fleshes them out into fuller narrative forms. As a result, journalistic storytelling includes characters (who), action (what), setting (where), chronology (when), motive/cause (why), and process (how). Fully developed, these elements are then assembled by the writer into the basic story template: Someone (one or more persons) encounters an obstacle (e.g., social, psychological, political) and then overcomes (or fails to overcome) that obstacle, leading to either a resolution or an open end. This narrative construction of factual information is so powerful because it not only informs but actually gives form—orientation, time and space, logical connections, meaning, intention, and focus—to lives that inherently lack forms.
“It feels like a movie,” readers often say when they read longform journalism. That is because, as Christopher Wilson has noted, realism is a style that makes people forget it is a style. Stylistic effects create the illusion that readers are directly experiencing reality. Writers use literary techniques to conceal the constructed nature of the text. They show rather than tell. As a result, readers develop mental images associated with the descriptions in the text. These stylistic effects derive from different sources and play out in manifold ways, depending on journalists’ individual creativity, skills, and tastes. However, a key distinction is whether a story is told in first or third person. First-person accounts describe acts of personal witnessing and offer testimonies. In combination with thick observational data, they create a form of ethnographic realism. Often, the writer organizes them around the theme of a journey, a voyage, a personal revelation. Joan Didion is a master of this kind of storytelling. From her early writings about cultural changes in the 1960s to personal accounts of the grief of seeing her partner and daughter die within a short amount of time, Didion created intimate accounts of both societal change and personal suffering. Third-person narratives, on the other hand, tell stories from the fly-on-the-wall perspective, introducing a cast of characters and their relationships. The writer relies on an omniscient point of view, using foreshadowing and flashbacks as well as multiple locations. The third-person perspective can construct a world unto itself, transporting the reader into a different time–space continuum. This kind of realism can be ethnographic as well, but in this case, the writer discards the role of a personal guide and instead retreats into the background. The aforementioned story “Hiroshima” is a paradigmatic example for this kind of cinematic writing. Using an understated tone of writing, Hersey described the experience of the atomic bomb from the perspective of six characters on the ground, relying on meticulously reported personal and sensory details that gave his depictions a three-dimensional character.
Longform and Digital Media
The current digital media environment created new opportunities for longform journalism and narrative nonfiction beyond the traditional forms of literary journalism. News organizations have increasingly embraced multimodal forms of journalistic storytelling that combine visual and written modalities for telling immersive stories. A groundbreaking example was “Snow Fall,” a multimedia story by The New York Times that won the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 2013. Combining text, video, and animated graphics, the story reconstructs how an avalanche buried a group of skiers in the state of Washington, killing three of them. Multimodal stories such as this are no longer the exception but common practice in leading news organizations. Longform journalism has also gained a strong foothold in the world of podcasts. Following the success of “Serial,” an investigative audio story in 12 episodes that was created by Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder in 2014, a whole cottage industry of narrative journalism podcasts has sprung up.
As narrative journalism expanded and found bigger audiences, some critics assert that this genre panders to the lowest common denominator of human interest stories and is inherently flawed, because it neglects structural analysis of societal issues and prevents the juxtaposition of opposing viewpoints. Moreover, these critics contend that narrative journalism often produces trivial stories driven by a desire to please commercial interests, causing harmful effects for political life and public debate. In contrast, a number of scholars emphasize how narrative journalism is uniquely positioned to illuminate the domain of everyday life, situating personal experiences in social, cultural, and political contexts. As a result, they are able to show that, because longform stories are constructed differently than traditional news stories, they link the private sphere with public life, highlighting the small story that illuminates larger questions concerning the self, communities, and the human condition.
One reason why longform narrative journalism might resonate with audiences in the current media environment is that this kind of storytelling complements information with emotionality without descending into sensationalism or infotainment (a combination of information and entertainment). Narrative journalists not only explore emotional experiences and subjectivities of individuals and groups but also put these emotional qualities in the center of their storytelling, challenging some aspects of objectivity (such as impartiality and detachment) as a traditional journalistic norm. On the other hand, acknowledging emotionality as part of professional journalism has expanded the repertoire of journalistic writing by capturing the breadth and depth of lived experiences through augmented objectivity.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.