news as narrative
All forms of news are constructed in a narrative way, but some forms of news are more narrative-driven than others. News as narrative, in its most common sense, can be defined as a structured account of one or more protagonists undergoing a series of events. Journalistic storytelling, in particular, uses different kinds of narrative conventions across a variety of genres (such as reportage or, first-person narrative) in various forms of media (including print, audio, video, and digital).
Even though journalistic forms and formats often seem homogenous and uniform, they have significantly changed over time. News as narrative, then, is a rather recent phenomenon that emerged in the second half of the 20th century and fundamentally altered some practices, values, and norms in journalism, particularly in the United States. A number of scholars have shown that news organizations in the United States moved away from a straightforward chronicling of daily events that was replaced by a more interpretive approach in which journalists were using more subjective, explanatory, and contextual elements in their presentation of news.
Between the 1960s and the 2000s, American journalism experienced a variety of cultural and institutional influences that created enabling conditions for reporters and editors to redefine the news genre and their professional roles toward encompassing more narrative, and thus more emotional, storytelling. In part, the evolution of news as narrative grew out of changing pressures on the news industry. In the 1960s and 1970s, journalists were coming to terms with changing lifestyles and the end of the New Deal consensus. In the 1980s, economic transformations and new business realities created opportunities for narrative storytelling but also pushed journalistic writing more toward commercial objectives. In the 1990s, when Americans were experiencing affluence and abundance after the Cold War had ended, journalism was exposed to and contributed to the mediatization of public life. Against this backdrop of both gradual and decisive social, economic, political, and cultural changes in the United States, news as narrative expanded the scope and mission of what journalists were doing. In addition to the traditional objective of journalism to answer the question of “What happened?”, narrative techniques allowed reporters and editors to address the questions “What does it mean?” and “How does it feel?”. Critics of this development contend that news as narrative prioritizes human interest at the expense of structural analysis, dramatizes instead of illuminates, offers light entertainment instead of public service, and leads to trivial stories driven by a desire to please commercial interests.
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In the context of journalism scholarship, scholars have focused on studying three different dimensions of narrative:
- narrative characteristics with regard to the production of news—both in terms of news as general narratives and journalistic stories as narrative news
- cultural functions of journalistic storytelling with respect to its mythological features as well as its patterned structures of meaning
- epistemological implications, examining how different types of narrative reflect different ways of knowing
This entry discusses these three strands of research, along with the development of new forms of storytelling in response to technological change.
Report versus story
As with other systems of symbolic forms, the production of news can be understood as a set of conventions shaping the content of information. There are two basic kinds of conventions: report and story. The news report offers a systematic explanation of current or past events, typically structuring the information in the form of an inverted pyramid with the most important part of information at the beginning and other aspects organized in descending order of relevance. News writing in general is characterized by conventions, maintaining the illusion that the presentation of the news is natural and neutral when in fact it is always already structured by implicit news values. The news report is a narrative convention that makes one forget it is a convention. As a result, scholars have been eager not only to demonstrate the constructed character of news reports but also their potential ideological side effects, privileging, for example, the perspective of government elites and professional experts over the experiences of regular people.
Narrative news stories, on the other hand, foreground stylistic elements such as character, plot, descriptive detail, and point of view with the goal of creating an immersive experience often designed to elicit emotional responses from readers, viewers, or listeners. This kind of journalistic storytelling borrows literary techniques to create reality effects, that is the illusion of being in the presence of reality itself. Consequently, scholarship has shown how journalists deliberately and strategically craft emotionally engaging narratives to highlight the lived experiences of people, dramatizing the large and often abstract events of which news is made. At the same time, critics of narrative journalism contend that this form of news prioritizes human interest at the expense of structural analysis, offers light entertainment instead of public service, and leads to trivial stories driven by a desire to please commercial interests.
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News as narrative, however, is not just a result of symbolic conventions in the context of news production. It is also determined by social conventions and organizational practices of reporting. As early as the 1970s, scholars explored how professional practices and occupational routines shape aesthetic conventions. They challenged the notion of news as a creative endeavor and instead emphasized the organizational pressures of a highly standardized manufacturing process. Nonetheless, scholarship also documented how narrative journalists were employing a specific set of reporting techniques more akin to the strategies of anthropologists and ethnographers. What this line of research established was the observation that narrative journalists were in a permanent tension to reconcile the demands of storytelling with the challenges of factual reporting. The discussion about determining the border between fact and fiction triggered lively debates between journalism scholars and literary theorists.
Cultural functions of journalistic narratives
The cultural functions of journalistic storytelling become apparent when we think about storytelling as an intrinsic and constitutive element of what it means to be a human being. If humans are storytellers, then different kinds of storytelling help construct particular social meanings. Some scholars have argued that news stories are modern forms of myths, emphasizing the universal character of stories in establishing a sequential and semantic order where none had been before. While some scholars sought to identify mythical archetypes in news coverage (e.g., the hero, the outcast, the traveler), others were more interested in the narrative capacity of journalists to create mythic figures in the context of public rituals and collective meaning-making, thereby asserting their authority in the public sphere. Yet, research has also shown that not all forms of journalistic storytelling provide closures to public forms of meaning-making. At the same time, as much as journalists may attempt to legitimize their roles as storytellers by advancing unresolved storylines, they also have to consider the role of audiences and other public actors to resist, reinterpret, and redefine dominant narratives.
More broadly, the term news narrative can also denote dominant interpretation of events or processes. Storytelling in this context constitutes a collective effort at constructing dominant interpretations of reality, a kind of framing, that results in news as an interpretive form of collective discourse, privileging some story lines and concealing others. As a range of scholars have contended, these narrative frames promote conventional ways of seeing and may reinforce existing ideologies. At the same time, however, the collaborative nature of dominant frames also opens opportunities for allowing a wide range of voices and viewpoints.
Epistemological dimensions
When examining news as narrative, scholars have also focused on conceptualizing narrative characteristics of news writing as different ways of knowing. Narratologists pointed out that narrative representations are different from, yet not inferior to scientific knowledge. As much as science offers exact measurements, say for capturing temperature, the act of storytelling can provide a specific account of what it felt like to dip a toe into freezing water on a particular day. Some scholars have tied this ability to address emotional experiences to a systematic and strategic practice of journalists to infuse their reporting with emotion, thereby foregrounding personal experiences in addition to telling the facts.
But these subjective experiences are not the only types of knowledge that news as narrative renders accessible. Since narrative inherently offers a particular strategy to interpret the interconnectedness of basic categories such as time, process, and change, news as narrative also has an objectifying dimension, revealing characteristics of social life and the human condition. As a result, this kind of journalistic storytelling has been identified as an efficient strategy to foster empathy as well as create opportunities for understanding otherness.
The interpretive approach of news as narrative has frequently spurred debates about the boundary between fact and fiction. While literary theorists were keen on deconstructing the porous border between reality and imagination of nonfiction writing, journalism scholars emphasized that interpretive writing must not give way to fabrication, manipulation, and deceit. The underlying question in these debates was how storytelling affected one of modern journalism’s core normative values: objectivity. The latter evolved over the 20th century and provided journalists with a conceptual anchor to express their role in society, emphasizing a privileged position for holding the powerful accountable. While critics of news as narrative argued that storytelling was undermining objectivity, others highlighted how the interpretive approach, as long as it is embedded in journalistic ethics and values, may actually augment the capability to convey information in objective, yet multidimensional ways.
New forms
News as narrative is a cultural practice that is constituted by institutional and organizational characteristics within specific media systems. At the same time, narrative techniques shape and constrain the representation of social and political reality. Narrative as news, then, can best be understood as a reflexive process of meaning-making in the realm of news and institutionalized public debate. As technology keeps transforming the media landscape, journalists are adapting both to new platform of storytelling and new narrative modalities. The strands of scholarship mentioned earlier are being updated and expanded in response to technological change. During the early 21st century, new forms of storytelling, such as podcasting, virtual reality, 3D experiences, “gamified” news, data journalism, and automated journalism, made it necessary to examine traditional conceptualizations of narrative and develop new strategies for assessing the narrative characteristics of these journalistic representations. Scholars will have to trace and analyze if and to what extent these new iterations heighten inherent tensions of news as narrative (e.g. reason vs. emotion, objectivity vs. subjectivity) and how journalists create novel conventions and routines around technological affordances.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.