The Narrative News Logic and the Role of Storytelling in News Work

• In Event: Expanding the Journalistic Repertoire: Opportunities and Challenges of Emerging News Logics

Abstract

Narrative news writing breaks with conventions, practices and rules of traditional news writing and instead advances a particular form of storytelling as a format for journalistic information delivery. With its emphasis on scenes instead of events, people instead of sources, and sequencing instead of a straightforward delivery of news, narrative journalism redefines the purpose, the practice and the possibilities of journalism in daily news production. Since the 1960s, the forms and practices of narrative journalism have greatly expanded in newspapers around the world. Using American news writing as a historical case study, this paper will discuss how narrative techniques challenged and reimagined practices of daily journalism in newspapers, how they were criticized as soft journalism by journalists as well as scholars and what role they play in a digital news environment that is saturated with entertainment values.

Author

• Thomas R. Schmidt, U of Oregon