Another Way to Tell the News, Another Way to Read the News: Immersion and Information in Narrative Journalism

Abstract

While Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative (1990) was only concerned with fictional and historical narratives, its influence on narrative theory has been much broader. Ricoeur's reflections expanded into the field of journalism, among other areas, notably through the notion of media narrative (or récit médiatique) as defined by Marc Lits (1997a). Following Lits, Ricoeur's legacy—and, more specifically, the distinction it inspired between immersive and informative narratives (Baroni 2018)—has been used to shed light on a specific kind of journalism often referred to as narrative journalism, that is, journalism that uses the writing techniques of fiction to tell news stories. This article further examines the dialectic between immersion and information in narrative journalism by exploring both journalists’ goals when writing their texts and receivers’ experiences when reading them. First, interviews with journalists show that they are largely aware of this dialectic and purposefully use an immersive form to help readers better understand information. Then, an exploratory study with readers reveals that they claim to look mostly for information yet seem to favor immersive narratives.