Analyzing narrative in media

During the last five years that I have been a journalism student I have learned to write stories with different narratives styles. In that short time period media has experimented a lot of changes. The incredibly fast development of internet has changed not just the way in which stories are read, but also how stories are been told.

In this article I will analyze different narratives in various journalistic formats and try to understand in which way journalist have chosen this kind of text and not others. All the stories that will appear are completely actual and has been selected because of the importance of their media and how its storytelling is the most adapted to new times.

Narrative in Twitter journalistic stories

Since its creation in 2006 Twitter has evolve as one of the most important tools that freelance journalists and traditional media currently use for the distribution of their stories. In some cases, the platform itself is the portal where journalistic work is published but usually it works as a place to link articles from other websites.

Despite the short number of characters available Twitter offers the journalist a wide range of possibilities that have diversified in different narrative strategies during the past 12 years. The interesting thing about this is that even having all these opportunities the techniques of the journalists has evolved in the same direction. So much so that we can find the same strategies from completely different kind of media.

In this process, try and failure has been very influential. Social networks bring to every user access to statistics of everything they publish. In the concrete, twitter gives the possibility of knowing the impact of your stories with the numbers of retweets and likes, which have been very significant to the development of new techniques.

Here there are some examples of tweets using the same narrative technique.

This has been named Intro and Twist and is one of the most common journalistic narratives which currently appear in the twitter feed. It is based in a very simple aspect, which is writing a very normal sentence that wouldn’t make the story interesting like: Trump claims to have “great respect” for women. And, after that, introducing the twist: but his words and actions says otherwise. This twist is normally the main aspect of the story and the main motive for reading it. This is the reason why it is usually left for the final of the tweet. It is like saying, this is a normal story, but this makes it worthy of your time.

Huffington Post was created in 2005 and Buzzfeed in 2006 and, born in which has been named the digital era, many people could think that these headlines work in this media because they do some kind of ‘sensationalist’ journalism. But the reality is that every story and every media use these techniques. Here some examples of BBC world service.

Narrative through characters

Now, I will analyze a ‘medium form’ article and, even if I will use screenshots of the parts I will talk about, here you have the link of The Guardian story.

In this article the structure is substantially different of a common news one. In fact, the inverted-pyramid, which is one of the most used structures, does not appears here. In this piece we find a system which has been called Kabob. In this system the stories begin with an anecdote, a characteristic particularly visible in the article we are analyzing.

This is the first paragraph, and the anecdote is clear. The main theme of the article are shoebox houses, but it will be introduced later. In the beginning the journalist decide to write about the main character of the story, telling us about its personal life and leading us to the principal point. This narrative technique is very useful because it helps the reader to understand the real dimensions of the story and create in it a sense of hype, What’s next?

In this article the anecdote is six paragraph long, which is a lot. But the writer success attracting the attention of the reader while gives some details about the problem with these houses. I will not be until the seven paragraph that the article will speak directly about it.

This part is what we call the meat. It last almost until the end and it includes a lot of data, which are useful to understand the magnitude of the problem. In this part the journalist does not abandond completely its literary style, bur he make it more economic and accesible.

The article uses a lot of sources and quotes more people who are suffering this same problem. These techniques help the reader to emphasize, because they make the story bigger and more affordable in an emotional sense.

Finally, the Kabob structure usually finish with another anecdote. In this article it happens exactly the same. The journalist brought us again the main character and make her finish the story. It is a very useful technique, because using her words as the closure he makes us remember that behind the numbers this is a story of people, humanizing it.