Abstract
In Narrative Theory in Journalistic Practice: Understanding Emerging Digital Genres, Hågvar, Hornmoen and Alnæs expanded, adapted and reimagined the narrative theory to address contemporary news formats that include multiple modalities. Recognizing the importance of emerging digital media genres, the authors, who are editors and authors of all but two chapters, reimagined the narrativity, as a traditional theory applicable to written feature stories, and expanded it to meet the needs of contemporary journalism and its formats, such as podcasts and scrollytelling online and social media stories.
While advancing this theoretical perspective, the authors advocated a constructivist approach that both acknowledges readers/viewers/listeners as those who interpret news stories and thus construct narratives, and emphasizes the contexts in which news stories are created. The key aspect of journalistic narrativity, according to the authors, is that it is no longer viewed as exclusive to literature and fiction. Instead, it functions as a fundamental and evolving epistemological tool for constructing representations of everyday life (p. 9). Building on Prince’s (1982) degrees of narrativity, the authors argued that journalistic texts, and even sentences or headlines, count as narratives as long as they contain a single narrative sequence (p. 10).
Hågvar, Hornmoen and Alnæs further complicated the narrative levels—micro, meso and macro—by emphasizing intertextuality and interdiscursivity of journalistic narratives. According to the authors, the narrative analysis at the microlevel undergoes “close reading of the text to uncover how it turns the representation of reality into a story” (p. 11) by focusing on story structure, the temporal sequence of the events, the characters and their assigned roles, and the story’s point of view. However, intertextuality is particularly important at the microlevel of analysis because it enables an examination of how quotations and accounts from various sources are woven together within a text. At the mesolevel, the concept of intertextuality is intrinsic to the coverage of the same event across multiple texts and platforms, which creates an intertextual narrative. Readers will, as the authors argued, construct different meso-narratives depending on their exposure to particular news texts and platforms. Finally, interdiscursivity is a crucial concept for macrolevel analysis, in which all microlevel and mesolevel narratives are connected and shaped by social institutions and ideologies, with implications for power dynamics.
The authors’ new definition of journalistic narrativity provides a framework for the application of the theory in the contexts of news stories that address future, live coverage, still images, news podcasts and social media posts. These news formats were chosen deliberately because not only do they represent emerging news formats, but they are also a testament to the ways journalistic narratives depart from traditionally defined fiction narratives. Despite this innovative approach to journalistic narrativity, the authors did not offer a single analytical strategy but instead supported multiple approaches to text interpretation.
Chapter 3 focuses on multimedia narratives journalists use to tell stories about the future, stories from the future and stories that evoke the future. Directly departing from traditional narratives that address stories that happened in the past, the authors argued that journalists can narrate about the present and the future depending on how successfully narrators position themselves temporally—in a subsequent narration, simultaneous narration or prior narration. For narratives to be perceived as truthful and trustworthy, journalists use scientific and factual information, and expert sources, while the accountability of the news stories is accomplished through the use of reference anchors that “in various ways refer to the present, and account for uncertainties” (p. 38).
The focus on a narrative causality construction in live coverage was discussed in Chapter 4. Hågvar and Hornmoen proposed three levels of causality behind causal attribution. Physical causality refers to natural cause and effect; agent causality addresses the actions of people and animals; whereas structural causality refers to social or political structures that affect what agents do. Each of these levels requires journalists to adhere to traditional norms of accuracy and ethical reporting, as well as to critically evaluate competing interpretations.
Chapter 5 argues that still imagery has narrative potential, especially in the context of multimodal news texts. News photography narrativity is accomplished through style and design, the information of who took the photo, and the context in which that photograph was published.
Chapters 6 and 7 address narrativity in the most recent news platforms—news podcasts and social media posts. The news podcasts’ narrative analysis incorporates vocal and semantic analysis and is “grounded in prosody, materiality, subject positions, and performativity” (p. 90). Finally, chapter 7 analyzes TikTok news videos by focusing on the degree of narrativity, the protagonist, the hook, the pace, the multimodality and the evaluation, which refers to viewers’ interpretations present in the comment section.
Narrative Theory in Journalistic Practice represents a theoretical advancement in narrativity and provides a new framework for narrative analysis of contemporary news formats. This framework simultaneously addresses how new multimodal formats affect journalistic narrativity and how readers’ engagement and interpretations have become a crucial part of it. This innovative approach to narrativity significantly contributes to qualitative research in journalism and media studies.