ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the reader to what this book is about and why it seeks to improve our understanding of journalistic narratives. It presents two different examples that both illustrate important features of contemporary journalism, for example, that its representations of reality will often be related and understood as narratives, and that a chosen narrative may naturalise a given interpretation of what is going on and overshadow competing interpretations. The book addresses a broader spectrum of contemporary journalistic narratives than feature stories in traditional journalism, with an emphasis on emerging digital genres. The aim is to explore digital genres of journalism empirically and develop theory and tools along the way that will equip both scholars and students to perform their own narrative analyses of today’s media texts.
