Much of contemporary journalism is the result of a constant state of flux, with fast-moving news events shaped by the 24/7 news cycle and shifting dissemination platforms and strategies that impact how journalistic stories are told. Journalism does not solely feature linear formats such as television, radio, and text-based productions; it also encompasses non-linear formats such as memes, podcasts, scrollytelling, and short TikTok videos. Within the attention economy, algorithmically structured platforms such as TikTok not only shape news consumption but also enable users to participate in the co-construction of journalistic narratives. News users may appropriate journalistic narratives within their own social media contexts, reshaping or contesting them in the process. It is this context of multimodalities and emerging digital journalistic formats that renders existing theoretical and methodological approaches to the identification of narratives in traditional written journalistic stories in need of updating. In an academic field, which focuses on narrative analysis, where methodological frameworks do not follow “a step-by-step model, answering some standard questions about the texts and considering the analysis done when you finish the final bullet point” (p. 8), the book Narrative Theory in Journalistic Practice, edited by Yngve Benestad Hågvar, Harald Hornmoen, and Jørgen Alnæs of Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), provides clear and practical theoretical concepts and methodological approaches to make sense of journalistic storytelling and narratives in the ever-changing media landscape.
The book consists of two introductory chapters that outline the aim and scope of the book (Chapter 1) and provide a theoretical overview of narrative analysis in journalism and an in-depth analysis of current challenges (Chapter 2). The book builds on five case studies, followed by a reflective chapter on the book’s additions to existing tools and approaches to narrative theory, in which the authors state that there is “no fixed way of doing narrative analysis of journalism” (p. 119). The book is not solely aimed at an academic audience but is accessibly written in order for the book to also “make sense even to readers who have no previous knowledge of narrative theory” (p. 5). Nearly all chapters open with an analysis of a contemporary journalistic artefact, a choice that is engaging but somewhat stylistically repetitive. Nevertheless, the book is well-structured, contains numerous historical and theoretical references from the field of journalism studies and narrative theory from both fiction and non-fiction perspectives, and offers four overarching guiding questions when performing analysis on journalistic narratives: 1) How is the text a narrative? 2) How is the plot constructed? 3) How is reality represented? 4) How is the narrative affected by format, genre, and context?
In Chapter 2, the authors argue for a distinct difference between narrative journalism (“a genre that employs the narrative storytelling techniques of voice, point of view, character setting, plot and/or chronology to report on reality through a subjective filter”; van Krieken & Sanders, 2021: 1404) and their approach to studying narratives within journalism. They reiterate that the “narrow definition” (p. 26) of narrative journalism “is intended to exclude ordinary news, as well as more general metanarratives that are evoked by journalistic texts” (p. 9). Almost all journalism can be regarded as a domain that creates journalistic narratives, the authors state, because it organises events into a meaningful whole. Narrativity is not an all-or-nothing characteristic; texts can exhibit varying degrees of narrative quality, with the authors citing Schudson (2011: 186), who stated that “all news stories are stories, but some are more storylike than others”. Building on Sternberg (2001, 2010), the authors argue that journalistic narratives are “constructed when the reader experiences gaps or twists in time that generate suspense, curiosity, and surprise” (p. 14). Also, journalistic narratives can have intriguing and configuring functions to “arouse the reader’s interest in the story and the need to know more” (p. 19) and “reconstruct a context in something that has happened” (p. 19). Narrative analysis is, therefore, essential for understanding how journalism shapes reality and what underlying ideas play a role in this process. These theoretical assumptions must be interpreted within the context of contemporary digital journalism, where the boundary between sender and receiver is blurring, and where the authors situate themselves within post-classical narratology in which “storytelling techniques affect – and are affected by – certain ways of seeing the world” (p. 13).
Building on this conceptual framework, the authors develop theoretical and methodological contributions for several journalistic formats that are central to contemporary news consumption, on formats such as TikTok posts, podcasts, live reporting, and cross-media storytelling. The authors’ contributions never feel forced or far-fetched. Chapter 7 introduces a two-part framework for identifying narratives in TikTok content, which is particularly valuable given the social platform’s current popularity for news consumption (Hendrickx, 2023; Hagar & Diakopoulos, 2025). TikTok content, for example, is known for its multimodality and versatility in terms of expression. Given TikTok’s highly multimodal nature, narratives emerge through the interaction of visual, textual, and auditory elements, such as oral narration, hashtags, body language, and on-screen text. To structure the narrative analysis, the authors take the notion of visual anchorage from Barthes (1964/1977) and state that all multimodal aspects of TikTok content can “suggest how the viewer should react to what is explicitly told” (p. 114). To make sense of the plethora of layers in TikTok content, the authors propose mapping it with a narrative model consisting of two axes: 1) a “sequential axis [that] describes the temporal and diachronic ordering of information, that is, what is told first, second, third and so on”; and 2) a multimodal axis which “describes the synchronic ordering of information, that is, what is told at the same time through different modalities such as voice, writing, video footage, sound effects, graphics and so on” (p. 114). Using this model could substantially aid the analysis of the interplay between the content and the narrative of the content, as was presented in the case study that focused on a Yahoo News TikTok post about the introduction by President Trump of protective tariffs on goods imported to the US.
The most elaborate contributions are made when the authors’ case studies focus on the positioning of the journalistic narrator, plot construction, and the representation of reality within journalistic narratives. They build these mostly in Chapters 3 and 4, which focus on journalistic narratives about the future and ABC News’ live breaking-news reporting of the mid-air crash of a passenger plane and an army helicopter in Washington, DC in January 2025. The analysis of 22 hours of ABC News’ live coverage of the crash (Chapter 4) is based around the concept of narrative causality, which is highlighted in the important task for live reporters to “establish the causal relations between the reported events” (p. 44) in a breaking-news story event. Based on the analysis, the authors distinguish between 1) physical causality (scientific causes and effects), 2) agent causality (individual actions), and 3) structural causality (systemic reasons for actions), which may have led to an event and which form part of the emerging narrative in the live reporting. The analysis also demonstrates, partly through its focus on identifying these three forms of causality, how different actors within the live reporting contest the actual possible causality of the crash. In particular, it demonstrates how US President Trump actively shifted the focus from physical or agent causality to structural causality, attempting to alter the narrative by pointing to alleged mistakes made by his presidential predecessors, thereby turning it into a systemic discussion. The chapter shows that methodically categorising the types of causality enables a systematic analysis of the framing of frame responsibility and meaning in breaking news and “actively shaping public understanding through narrative construction” (p. 61).
Usually, journalism focuses on the here and now, but in Chapter 3, the authors focus on journalistic stories about the future, a highly understudied domain. In this chapter, the authors conceptualise and analyse three kinds of future stories: 1) stories about the future; 2) stories from the future; and 3) stories from the present that evoke the future. The position of the journalist as narrator is essential to making the story trustworthy. In analysing these positions, the authors propose building on Genette’s (1980) narration positions of the narrator: the subsequent (where the narrator places themselves after the events in time); the simultaneous (where the narrator reports events as they happen); and the prior (where narration takes place before the depicted events). The chapter concludes that stories about the future are told through both simultaneous and subsequent narration, and that stories evoking the future usually employ subsequent narration, in contrast to stories set in the future, which are characterised by prior narration. Furthermore, the chapter focuses on the introduction of the concept of reference anchors, which are identified as tools that bridge the gap between prior narration and the established situation of the current world. The authors suggest that these reference anchors entail including expert comments and quotes or references to real present or past events, using modality markers like “may”, “could”, “might”, or “possibly” to signal the hypothetical nature of a scenario and using open-ended “what if” questions to frame a scenario as a thought experiment rather than a definitive statement of fact. Unlike fiction, journalism is bound by what Cohn (1999) has called the level of reference, which is “the more or less reliably documented evidence of past events” (Cohn, 1999: 112). The reference anchors represent the “commitment to reality” (p. 20) in these future stories, and investigating them in a narrative analysis could be a fruitful exercise, the authors present convincingly.
Hågvar, Hornmoen, and Alnæs have edited an interesting and compelling book in which each chapter makes at least one theoretical or methodological addition to the study of journalistic narratives. The only point at which their approach feels somewhat forced is in the chapter on visual storytelling (Chapter 5), where the emphasis is on a theoretical contribution. This chapter describes three “phases” in the exploration of stories in photojournalism and visual language. The journalistic impetus for this chapter is the powerful imagery of photojournalist Lynsey Addario, who sends striking photographs from places such as Ukraine to The New York Times, which the newspaper then publishes. Addario’s most impressive image, taken just after a mortar attack in the Ukrainian suburb of Irpin, forms the inspiration for this chapter. The link between three epistemological “traps that visual narrative analysis needs to address” (p. 65) and this image is not presented in a wholly convincing manner. These traps include a text trap, truth trap, and temporality trap. It would have been stronger if more space had been devoted to this, for example, by gathering the experiences of fellow researchers by showing them the photograph and asking them to reflect on the three traps, or by identifying those traps empirically based on, for example, semi-structured interviews. Nevertheless, Hågvar, Hornmoen, and Alnæs successfully “uncovered the need for more precise terms and frameworks” (p. 122) and created and “updated ways of applying existing theory” (p. 123) to the study of new and distinct journalistic formats, making the book an extremely versatile resource for fellow academics, students, and journalists to conduct their own analysis of journalistic narratives.