ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the traditions of scholarship around news, storytelling, and narrative. It considers how progressive waves of technological change have contributed new narrative affordances, ranging from blogs to immersive and automated journalism. News narrative can refer to a collective body of news stories that gel into a master narrative, a story line that emerges when different news sources gravitate towards a dominant interpretation of events or processes. The non-closure characteristics of journalistic storytelling also point to possibilities for audiences and other public actors to resist, reinterpret, and redefine dominant story lines. “Newspapers that stress their storytelling function,” M. J. Broersma argued, “tend to use an emotionally-involving style, often characterized as sensationalism, that aims to appeal to the emotions of their readers.” The complicated relationship between objectivity and storytelling has been of particular concern for scholars of literary journalism. Journalists’ perception that emotional storytelling is central to audience engagement is backed up by empirical research.
