News as Narrative

News and Narrative Forms

As a particular news form or writing style, narrative news stories are often described as standing in opposition to the inverted pyramid style (where facts are presented in a descending order of importance), simple chronicles, or the more general “information model” of journalism, which emphasizes factuality over aesthetics or emotion. The information model, which developed towards the end of the nineteenth century and gained prominence in the twentieth, marginalized the once-prevalent narrative style in favor of a fact-centered, “hard news” style. However, narrative journalism has gained renewed popularity in the early twenty-first century, where traditional news outlets are looking for strategies to combat declining readership, and provide added value to available online information. Narrative journalism, which goes beyond a mere rendering of facts, is one such strategy.

A narrow definition of narrative news stories refers to texts that begin with an anecdote rather than a summary lead and proceed to describe events in sequential order rather than presenting information in a descending order of importance. A broader view of narrative forms in news suggests that news stories incorporate narrative devices as wide-ranging as temporal structure, setting, point of view, characterization, personalization, conflict, dialogue, suspense, climax, metaphors, or irony. These varied narrative strategies can be found in different combinations and to different degrees in print or broadcast news texts. They also serve multiple aims, from capturing readers'/viewers' attention through ideological framing, to establishing journalistic authority. News texts are thus seen as having different degrees of narrativity rather than being narratives or not. Similarly, while narrative style is often associated with soft news, human interest stories, magazine journalism, tabloids, or “new journalism,” researchers have widely demonstrated the presence of narrative elements in hard news and mainstream journalism, including bastions of “information journalism” like The New York Times. One can therefore see different journalistic modes—such as soft versus hard news or tabloids versus broadsheets—as different positions on a “storytelling continuum.”

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