Narrative journalism, orliterary journalism,[1] is a form ofcreative nonfiction in which the author applies the literary devices and stylistic features of fiction to anews story.
Narrative journalism usesstorytelling techniques to present information about current events and is composed of three aspects: setting (the context behind the story), complication (the main events of the story) and outcome (the story's aftermath). Whereas regular news reports follow theinverted pyramid format, narrative journalists generally present their pieces in chronological order or divide them into episodes.[2] News stories that do not take the narrative format are called "hard news" stories.[3]
A narrative journalist may employ literary devices likesuspense,flashbacks andflashforwards 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.[4][5] Many narrative journalists write infirst-person, thereby including themselves as characters, to create the appearance of a connection between themselves and their stories.[6] There may be amoral in a work of narrative journalism.[7]
Narrative journalism gives more coverage than regular news reporting does to the contexts of and circumstances behind events. Narrative journalists attempt to make their readers understand their sources' motives and actions by incorporating their sources' thoughts into their pieces.[8][9] British scholar John E. Richardson wrote that narrative journalism "illustrate[s] and propagate[s] social values" and thereby gives readers more ways of "comprehending the events of the world around us".[10]
Narrative journalism has historically appeared in literary form through books, magazines, essays and newspaper articles.[8] Written narrative journalism emulatesliterary fiction's style of prose.[9] Narrative journalism can also be created in other media, such aspodcasts andradio 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.[4][11] Journalists have also used data visualisations, virtual reality, video games and animations to present news stories.[12]
The advent of the internet in the 1990s and 2000s caused a decline in newspapers' readerships; because newspapers no longer make enough money to sustain lengthy issues, news outlets have decreased the number of pages and features they include in them, so narrative pieces do not appear regularly in newspapers anymore. Narrative journalism's place in magazines has decreased as well. It has become more common since then for narrative journalists to create and publish their work on online news websites and throughaudiovisual media.[13][14]
Thetheatre andmythology ofAncient Greece included dramatic retellings of supposedly real events and are the most likely progenitors of narrative journalism.[9] Narrative journalists apply the same concepts and devices to their stories that Ancient Greek dramatists did to their plays; narrative journalism generally contains "complete" storylines with beginnings, middles and ends, and includes incidents that cause major events later on in the story. The flashbacks and flashforwards used in narrative journalism are similar to the altered chronology used by Homer in his epic poems and Sophocles inOedipus the King.[15]
Characteristics of narrative journalism could be found inDaniel Defoe's writings of the 18th century and in therealist novels of the 19th century.[16] In the mid-18th century, English writerSamuel Johnson and Scottish writerJames Boswell attempted to write nonfictional accounts of their lives that they referred to as "novels".[17]
Journalism in 18th- and 19th-century Germany was indistinguishable from literature as most German journalists then, likeHeinrich Heine andHeinrich von Kleist, were writers who happened to develop interests in journalism.[18] Norwegian travel writers in the 19th century embellished their reportage with fictional elements.[8]
In Germany afterWorld War I, theWeimar Republic constitutionally granted its citizens freedom of opinion but by 1921 penalised "subversive" news outlets; a literary, indirect style of reporting was less likely than hard news to face censorship and thus became ubiquitous in newspapers and literature during the 1920s.Egon Erwin Kisch, one of the most prominent narrative journalists in Germany, had been publishing pieces of narrative journalism (or literary reportage) since the 1900s.[19] Literary journalism, as with every other genre of journalism, disappeared in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, when theNazi Party eliminated independent journalism and persecuted political dissidents, causing many journalists and intellectuals to emigrate.[18]
AfterWorld War II ended in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany, theAllied forces took over the German news industry; presuming that subjectivity in German journalism had propagandised the public, they required Germany to adopt a wholly fact based system of reporting. Literary journalism did not return to German media until the 1960s.[18]
In the 1970s, after the end ofFrancisco Franco's regime following his death in 1975, Spanish columnists, many of whom were also novelists, developed a style of writing,periodismo informativo de creación, that combined the literary style of narrative journalism with the commentarial basis ofopinion journalism. Among the columnists who created this style wereFrancisco Umbral,Rosa Montero,Manuel Vázquez Montalbán andMaruja Torres.[20]
Attempts to write nonfictional accounts in the manner of novels were made in the United States as early as the former half of the 19th century, withAugustus Baldwin Longstreet's 1835 bookGeorgia Scenes andHenry David Thoreau'sCape Cod, the latter of which was serialised in 1855 inPutnam's Monthly Magazine and published in print in 1865.[21]
Narrative journalism became an established form in and of itself in the latter half of the century, after theAmerican Civil War ended andrealism turned into the dominant literary movement. Folklorist and anthropologistLafcadio Hearn's 1876 article "Levee Life" was an example of literary realism applied to journalism.Stephen Crane's accounts ofNew York City in the 1890s were filled with "a host of literary techniques, including contrast, dialogue, concrete description, detailed scene setting, careful word selection ... and irony".[22]
Muckrakers includingUpton Sinclair,Lincoln Steffens andIda Tarbell in the early 1900s during theProgressive era wrote their investigations of social issues, like political corruption and unethical business practices, in the form of narratives;McClure's Magazine was the most prominent publisher of these pieces.[23]Jack London's investigative reporting on poverty inThe 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 participate in his own narrative.[16]
Narrative journalism fell out of favour with most publications, with an exception ofThe New Yorker, when objectivity became a standard in American journalism in the 1920s and 1930s and journalists started using the inverted pyramid structure to write their stories.[9][24] After World War II concluded, journalists who wanted to involve themselves more closely with their subjects and give their readers more intimate depictions of them recommenced to experiment with narrative in their work.[25]
Writers in the 1960s, includingTruman Capote,Joan Didion,Hunter S. Thompson,Gay Talese andTom Wolfe, who wanted to appeal to thecounterculture and other societal changes of that decade questioned the importance of complete objectivity in journalism;[26]New Journalism andGonzo journalism came into existence as a result. Both of these genres centred their authors' thoughts and experiences and presented real stories in the style of literary fiction.[27] Capote'sIn Cold Blood, in which Capote recounted themurders of four members of aKansas family, was published in 1966; Capote asserted thatIn Cold Blood was the progenitor of the nonfiction novel.[28]
In 1969 theWashington Post, wanting to attract the then-adolescentbaby boomers to its newspaper, 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 American journalism.[29]
Early-20th-centurymodernist writers throughoutLatin America created a style of narrative journalism calledcrónica.[30]
The dispatches that engineer and writerEuclides da Cunha published in the newspaperO Estado de S. Paulo during theWar of Canudos in the 1890s were the first instances of literary journalism in Brazil. Thecrônica (different fromcrónica) was a genre of social commentary, popular during the same time, that had characteristics of literature and journalism but was not organised chronologically; this genre died out in the early 1900s. From the 1900s to the publication of his last book in 1919,João do Rio wrote many narratives covering the lives ofRio de Janeiro's residents; he relied on his own observations and his interviews with subjects for information, but wrote in a novel-like style. Although Rio's books sold well, literary journalism did not regain popularity in Brazil until the 1940s and 1950s.[31]
Argentinian crime fiction writerRodolfo Walsh's 1957 bookOperación Masacre, which exposed an attempted massacre of twelve men (six of whom survived) by police in the province ofBuenos Aires,[32] might have been the firstnon-fiction novel, or novel-length work of narrative journalism.[33]
Narrative journalism began inAustralia with theappearance of English settlers, who had brought with them theprinting press, in 1788. Explorers and military officers, the most popular of them beingWatkin Tench, wrote literary accounts, in the forms of books and letters, of their exploits within Australia and around the world. These accounts, which contained suspense anddialogue, were usually commissioned by, and written for, publishers and readers living in Britain who were curious about what their authors experienced in Australia.[34] Journalism itself only became established decades later in the 1820s. Starting in the 1830s, journals such asHill's Life,The Satirist,Australian Magazine andThe Currency Lad publishedshort stories and articles on various topics including humour, satire, crime and human interest.[35]
In the 1890s theBulletin, based inSydney, featured, as well as poetry, short stories and political satire, the literary pieces ofBanjo Paterson andHenry Lawson.[36]
An Australian version of New Journalism occurred, inspired by the American movement, in the 1960s.[37]
In China, a genre of narrative journalism calledbaogao wenxue, meaning "reportage literature", appeared in the 1930s; it discussed social problems and used ordinary people as its subjects.[38]Baogao wenxue was influenced by the literary journalism of Kisch, who had visited China in the 1930s to promote his literary reportage and write a book titledSecret China.[39]
Japanese journalists' use of narrative increased in the 1960s, and the term "New Journalism" was applied in the 1970s to this movement, which was similar to the New Journalism of the Western world; contributors to Japanese New Journalism includedTachibana Takashi,Sawaki Kōtarō [ja],Ryūzō Saki andUwamae Junichirō.[40]
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