True Storytelling: Narrative Journalism and the Interpretive Turn in U.S. Newspapers

Guest talk by Postdoctoral Fellow Thomas Schmidt, Agora Journalism Center, University of Oregon. 

Abstract: This presentation provides an overview of how narrative journalism fundamentally changed the American newspaper industry in the last quarter of the 20^th century. It offers an institutionally-situated history of narrative journalism’s evolution from the New Journalism of the 1960s to longform literary journalism in the 1990s. This analysis shows that the New Journalism, contrary to popular beliefs, did indeed have a significant impact on daily news production in American newspapers. Yet, this study also demonstrates that the evolution of narrative techniques in late twentieth century American journalism was more nuanced, more purposeful and more institutionally based than the New Journalism myth suggests. Drawing from archival research, oral history interviews and textual analysis of trade publications, this presentation examines the emergence of narrative journalism with respect to new journalistic roles and practices that consequently legitimized certain norms, ideas, and news values. Eventually, his kind of journalistic storytelling challenged the orthodoxy of traditional news reporting, leading to porous boundaries between news and entertainment but also to charges of sensationalism, de-politicization and commercialization. The implications of this paradigmatic shift towards a more interpretive approach to news reporting and writing still reverberate today.

This is a joint venture between the MEF-research group on "Media Systems and Journalism" and the MA-course "Journalism, Culture and Society: Theory and Analysis".