Narrative

Narrative journalism is typically considered a subset of journalistic writing, but when our definition of journalism is expanded to include semantic practices, then narrative journalism generically describes our approach to newsgathering and reporting in a non-semantic fashion.

In the narrow sense, narrative journalism is journalism that identifies a storyline and includes a beginning, middle and end. This is typically the distinction between narrative journalism and inverted pyramid rews reporting. However, both of these approaches still begin with "news judgment" assumptions about which facts are significant and interesting, and these distinctions are based on what's part of "the story," rather than what's part of the relevant information model.

So I propose that any news reporting that is based on stories alone is narrative, because it proposes that what is interesting is what is important. And since humans are typically interested in conflict, drama and emotion, information that meets these criteria is over-represented.

This is why "master narratives" in news have such influence, as our meta-understanding of themes in society are familiar to audiences and therefore become organizing filters for viewing new information.This approach to news is inherently limited, but it is profitable because "interest" is what news organizations sell to advertisers.