13.Allan Bell- News Stories as Narratives

ALLAN BELL

NEWS STORIES AS NARRATIVES Journalists do not write articles. They write stories. STORY

STORYTELLER JOURNALISTS

has structure, direction, viewpoint, point Many kinds (fairy tales, fables, gospels, legends, etc.) Embedded in all sorts of language use (face-to-face, public address) Significant role in language behaviour and society. Professional story tellers. Their work is focused on the getting and writing of stories.

NEWS STORIES AND PERSONAL NARRATIVES

Allan Bell compares news stories with narratives of personal experience told in face-to-face conversation, using Labov’s narrative categories. He states that news stories have some of the elements of personal narratives and their order and importance are different. Labov’s narrative categories are: abstracr, orientation, evaluation, action, resolution and coda. Not all this categories are present in news stories. Structure of personal narratives in conversation: 1.ABSTRACT: summarizes the central action and main point of the narrative, pre-empts the question, why is this story being told? 2.ORIENTATION: sets the scene (who-when-where-initial situation) 3.COMPLICATING ACTION: central part of the story; answers the question, what happened? 4.EVALUATION: justification of the value of the story being told. Why the events are reportable (importance of what happened) 5.RESOLUTION: what finally happened to conclude the sequence of events 6.CODA: wraps up the action; returns the conversation from the time of the narrative to the present. Only the complicating action and some degree of evaluation are obligatory components of the personal narrative. Because press stories are generally longer and carry much more detail than broadcast news, the structure of press stories is more complex. Even long broadcast stories are shorter and less complex than many press stories. The written text remains paramount and the visual subsidiary. ABSTRACT

The importance of the lead or the first paragraph in establishing the main point of a news story is clear. The lead has the same function in news stories as the abstract in personal narratives. It summarizes the central action and establishes the point of the story. The lead as summary or abstract is obligatory in hard news, and optional in personal narrative. It is often set off form the rest in larger type or across several columns. It is a device by which copy editor or audiences can get the main point from reading a single opening sentence, and on that basis decide whether to continue. The headline is an abstract of the abstract. The lead pares the story back to its essential point, and the headline abstracts the lead itself. They are put by subeditors (not by journalists or news agencies) ORIENTATION

In personal narrative, orientation sets the scene. In news stories, such orientation is obligatory. For journalists who, what, when and where are the basic facts which concentrate at the beginning of a story, but may be expanded throughout the story.

The dateline specifies the location from which the journalist “filed” the story to the news agency. It is carried below the headline and above the lead. Following the lead paragraph, there may be more detailed information (specification in case readers do not know it). EVALUATION It is the means by which the significance of a story is established. In personal narrative, evaluation is what distinguishes a story with point and meaning. Evaluation pre-empts the question, so what? It gives the reason why the narrator is claiming the floor and the audience´s attention. News stories also require evaluation to establish the significance of what is being told, to focus the events, and to justify claiming the audience’s attention. In news stories, the lead paragraph is a nucleus of evaluation, because it focuses the story in a particular direction. Focusing a story is a prime preoccupation of the journalist. Until a journalist finds what to lead a story with, the story remains unfocused. In personal narrative, evaluative devices may occur throughout the narrative but are typically concentrated near the end, just before the resolution. In the news story, evaluation focuses in the lead. Its fuction is to make the contents of the story sound newsworthy. ACTION At the heart of a personal narrative is the sequence of events which occurred. A defining characteristic of narrative is the temporal sequence of its sentences. The actions appear in the same order as they occur. However, news stories are almost never told in chronological order. Even in the lead paragraph, result may precede the cause. In the story proper, the time sequence (common in narratives) is reversed. The result is placed before the action which caused it. This is a common principle of news writing: the outcome takes priority over the action or process. This also enables news stories to be updated day after day, hour after hour. Where chronological order defines the structure of personal narrative, a completely different force is driving the presentation of the news story. Perceived news value overturns temporal sequence and imposes an order completely at odds with the linear narrative point. It moves backwards and forwards in time, picking out different actions on each cycle. RESOLUTION The personal narrative moves to a resolution: the fight is won, the accident survived. News stories often do not present such clear cut results. When they do, the result will be in the lead rather than at the end of the story. One kind of news does follow the chronology of the personal narrative: sport reporting. Sport makes good news because there is always a result. News stories are not rounded off. It is not temporally structured, or turned in a finished fashion. Stories are regularly cut from the bottom up, which is a great incentive to get what you believe to be the main points in early. CODA There is no coda in a news story. In personal narratives it serves as an optional conclusion to the story, to mark its finish, to return the floor to other conversational partners, and to return the tense from narrative time to the present. None of these functions is necessary in the newspaper where the floor is not open and where the nex contribution is another story .

NEWS STORIES

Abstract Obligatory Orientation/Evaluation Usually in the lead Action Non chronological. Results are presented first Quotation Direct: important to credibility and to colour Report of other experiences More objective, impersonal Various sources Precision (figures) Complex syntax, nominalization

NARRATIVE

Optional Throughout Chronological, linear. Results are presented at the end Direct: important to give flavour Narrator´s experience-personal First person One viewpoint Simple syntax

In news, the abstract is obligatory. Orientation and evaluative material occurs in a similar fashion to personal narrative, but tends to concentrate in the first sentence. The central action of the news story is told in non-chronological order (the resul and consequences have priority). Both, personal narratives and news stories tend to include direct quotations ans eyewitnesses. The flavour of the eyewitness and colour of direct involvement is important to both forms. Four features typical of the news story but alien to the face-to-face narrative: 1. the personal narrative is just that, personal. It relates the narrator’s own experience, while the news story reports on other’s experiences 2. where the personal narrative is told form one viewpoint (the narrator’s) in news a range of sources is often cited. 3. news stories usually gives numbers with a precision which is foreign to conversational stories. 4. The syntax of personal narratives is simple. The syntax of news stories can be complex THE STRUCTURE OF NEWS STORIES

Most of the categories which Van Dijk has identified in news discourse are needed. A news text consists of an abstract, attribution and the story proper. ‘Attribution’ of where the story came form is not always explicit. It can include agency credit and/or journalist’s byline, optionally plus place and time. The ‘abstract’ consists of the lead and for press news, a headline. The ‘lead’ will include the main event and possibly a second event. The lead may also incorporate attribution, and supplementary categories such as evaluation. A ‘story’ consists of one or more episodes, which in turn consist of one or more events. ‘Events’ must contain actors and action, usually express setting, and may have explicit attribution. The categories of attribution, actors and setting need to be recognized as part of the structure of news stories. They perform the orientation. These are also part of the journalist´s mental analysis of what goes in a story: who, when, where, who said? As well as those elements which present the central action, we recognize three additional categories that can contribute to an event: follow up, commentary, and background. Follow up: covers any action subsequent to the main action of an event: verbal reaction or non-verbal consequences. Because it covers action occurring after what a story has treated as the main action; follow-up is a prime source of subsequent updating stories: ‘follow-ups’. Commentary: provides the journalist’s or news actor’s observations on the action. It may be represented by context, by explicitly evaluation, it may express expectations held by the journalist or a news actor on how the situation could develop next. Background: covers any events prior to the current action (previous episodes). If the background goes beyond the near past, it is classed as history.

‘Follow up’ and ‘background’ can have the character of episodes in their own right. That is, ‘episode’ is a recursive category and can be embedded under consequences, reaction, history or background.

News text Abstract Headline

Attribution

Lead

Story

Source Place Time

News Agency Journalist’s byline

Attribution

Actors

Setting

Place Time

Action

Episode 1 Event 1

Follow-up

Episode n Event n

Commentary

Background

Consequences Reactions Context Expectations Previous History episodes Evaluation