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Narrative journalism is a form of literary journalism, creative nonfiction and long-form journalism in which the author applies the literary devices and stylistic features of fiction to a real story.
Narrative journalism uses storytelling techniques to present news stories. A narrative journalist may employ literary devices like suspense, flashbacks and flashforwards to engage his audience, and the piece may be written as if the events covered were parts of a plot and the people involved were characters. [1] [2] Whereas regular news reports follow the inverted pyramid format, narrative journalists generally present their pieces in chronological order. [3] Many narrative journalists write in first-person, thereby including themselves as characters, to create the appearance of a connection between themselves and their stories. [4] There may be a moral in a work of narrative journalism. [5]
Narrative journalism usually appears in literary form through books, magazines, essays and newspaper articles. [6] Written narrative journalism emulates literary fiction's style of prose. [7] Narrative journalism can also be created in other media, such as podcasts and radio broadcasts whose hosts use similar storytelling techniques to written narrative journalism. Podcasting and radio permit narrative journalists to make use of sound effects, and their own voices, to express emotions and ideas that cannot be conveyed as strongly in text. [1] [8]
Narrative journalism gives more coverage than regular news reporting does to the contexts of and circumstances behind events; narrative journalists attempt to put their readers in the perspectives of the people they are covering, so that the readers can understand their motives and actions. [6] Narrative journalists are similar in this way to anthropologists. [9]
The theatre and mythology of Ancient Greece included dramatic retellings of supposedly real events and thus could be considered the predecessors of narrative journalism. Characteristics of narrative journalism could be found in Daniel Defoe's writing in the 18th century, [10] but the current form of narrative journalism did not develop until the 19th century. Female journalists in the United States in the mid-to-late 19th century who wanted to continue the movement of sentimentalism, which was being supplanted by realism, used an emotional and literary style in writing accounts of real events. Norwegian travel writers during the same period embellished their reportage with fictional elements. [6]
Jack London's investigative reporting on poverty in The People of the Abyss (1903) is often seen as an early example of modern narrative journalism, as London disguised himself as a tramp in order to act as a participant in his own narrative. [10] Narrative journalism fell out of favour with most publications, with an exception of The New Yorker , when objectivity became a standard in American journalism in the 1920s and 1930s. [11]
In 1969 the Washington Post , wanting to attract the then-adolescent baby boomers, replaced its women's section with a Style section, which contained longer, more interpretive and more opinionated pieces than its regular news and revived narrative's place in mainstream journalism. [12] One of the first "non-fiction" novels of investigative journalism was Operación Masacre, completed in 1957 by the Argentinean Rodolfo Walsh. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966) was one of the first English-language examples of the genre, and it has since been established as a historic example of narrative journalism in novel form. Capote demonstrated to writers the possibility of using creative techniques while retaining the guidelines of journalism.
Capote's contemporary Tom Wolfe wrote The New Journalism in 1974 and is credited with popularizing discussion on the appropriateness of narrative in journalism. He cites Gay Talese as the "father" of New Journalism in "The Gay Talese Reader," arguing that Talese exemplifies the foundations of narrative journalism.
Today, many nonfiction novels use narrative journalism to tell their stories. Print publications such as Harper's , The New Yorker , Esquire , Rolling Stone , and The Village Voice are also welcome homes to narrative journalists.
Many mainstream newspaper publications are still wary of supporting narrative journalism due to time and space constraints, though some will print an occasional narrative in Sunday features or a supplemental magazine.
