Whether we like it or not, journalists are non-fiction storytellers. We obey rules of genre, use recurring plot tropes, and employ narrative structures.
Yet for most of our history we have masked the narrative rules of our craft: we learn about sticking to the inverted pyramid; about the rules of writing formats like the profile or review. And we learn to look for human interest angles like a rags-to-riches angle, the obstacles that sources have overcome, or to hinge an investigation on the reporter's 'quest'.
Now something has changed: storytelling has proliferated online - with new genres, new structures, and an increasing demand for longform reporting. Learning the inverted pyramid and churning out formulaic reporting for one platform doesn't cut it any more, especially as publishers increasingly rely on automation to generate the more basic news formats.
Here, then, are some tips for telling stories on any platform.
Writing about narrative in 1993 (PDF), Martin Cortazzi argued that the most typical narrative structure consisted of 6 elements: an abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation, result, and coda.
The structure can easily be extended to news: journalism students learning the inverted pyramid structure are told to start with a summary - abstract - of the 'new thing' that the story is telling us: who has done what (typically repeating the details in the headline). The background - orientation - only comes after these key new facts have been established: "The announcement comes after an increase in knife crime..."
Reporters move on to complication by inserting quotes from people in some sort of oppositional role - "Charities criticised the move..." - and end the story by returning it to the present, typically ending on a summative quote or a 'what happens next' detail ("The consultation ends on Friday").
Where news reporting strays from this structure is important and helpful to discuss: student journalists often feel the need to 'evaluate' events and insert their own conclusions - the tug of narrative structure is strong - but identifying this and advising against it is helpful.
What about longer feature formats? Even here the structure is useful: longform pieces often begin with some sort of anecdote, but the anecdote - when used well - acts as an abstract of the issue being investigated or explored:
This is, in my opinion, a good thing - for two reasons: first, it forces us to be more reflexive about our practices, to acknowledge and challenge the decisions we might have previously made unconsciously and uncritically.
And secondly, it provides an opportunity for journalism to better engage its audiences.
One reason for this is that formulaic newswriting is under attack: on one front is robot journalism, using templates and algorithms to generate 'news'; on another front is platform publishing: a 300 word inverted pyramid story doesn't translate to Facebook or Twitter; the TV or radio package doesn't work on YouTube or Instagram.
Of course the problem with acknowledging journalism's narrative devices is that it challenges a story we have told ourselves for decades: the story of journalism's quest to be factual and objective, to stand apart from the liars and fiction-makers. In this story 'narrative' sounds too much like 'fiction'; it challenges the myth we created of journalists being a mere conduit for the truth.
That myth has been crumbling for some time now: audiences and journalists are aware that choices must always be made in newsgathering: which stories to pursue, which sources are accessible, and which quotes, facts and clips to use are all decisions we cannot shirk. The bad journalist, we know, doesn't have any news sense (they choose the wrong stories); they ask the wrong questions; and they write too much.
There are many ways to tell a story, and many stories to tell. An 'investigation' can be trying to establish the cause of a problem, or solutions to that problem; it can be revealing previously hidden unethical behaviour, or shining a light on issues which are 'hidden in plain sight'; it can be holding a mirror up to a part of society to reveal its scale; or giving a voice to that part of society as a step towards a more sophisticated understanding of their problems. Here are some approaches and how they can be applied to longer investigative stories and other features.
Depending on the type of story, you might adopt different approaches to telling it. The following are just some common plots identified by Christopher Booker in his book 'The Seven Basic Plots'
- A 'quest' narrative is particularly useful: it could be the story of your quest to get to the bottom of the truth (useful if you don't succeed but the journey is still informative); or the story of a campaigner's quest, someone inside the establishment who is trying to effect change, a whistleblower or pretty much anyone trying to achieve or uncover something - this is the prize.
- The 'mystery' plot is also mentioned in the book but not listed among the 7. This is essentially a quest to uncover the truth of something, but is worth identifying separately as Booker does.
- 'Overcoming the monster' is a similar plot, but this specifically involves an antagonist. It may be a faceless one, such as a police force, or it may be more concrete such as people traffickers, or a particular individual such as a powerful person suspected of child abuse. The monster could be threatening a person, a place (a country might be threatened in an investigation into wealth extraction or tax evasion; a town might be threatened in a story about organised crime or environmental change), or even the world (some stories about environmental change or nuclear weapons have global threat)
- 'Rebellion Against 'The One'' (also not included in the seven) is perhaps a darker, dystopian version of this: "The hero spends the first half of the storyline insistent that he is right, and the power is wrong, but over the course of the story he comes to realize he has a very limited perception of reality, and that the reverse is true. In the end, the hero recognizes the governing force’s right to rule."
- 'Rags to riches' plots are self-explanatory. They might be used to tell the story of a person's rise to power, for example. This is most likely to be a subplot in an investigation (see below) but in specialist reporting there are many profiles or interviews with senior figures which fall into this category.
- 'Tragedy' is the opposite of rags to riches: it tells the story of a fall from grace, typically because of a specific mistake (it may be that trying to cover up that mistake is what initiates events). Investigations around 'how did this happen' often use this plot: for example after the Grenfell Tower fire or the collapse of Carillion, journalists will dig into the background to see what mistakes led to this - and here you hear the word - "tragedy".
- 'Voyage and return' follows a journey 'there and back'. The key point here is that there must be a reason for the person to have to come back: it may be because something turns out to be 'too good to be true'. Examples in investigations include trafficking (a person is tempted by misleading claims of conditions, and must then make their way back home), whistleblowing (someone gets a great job but discovers things aren't as they should be - see Snowden for an example) or even perhaps change-of-career stories (the footballer who has a career-ending injury and has to return home to start again)
- 'Rebirth' plots have a similar focus on a 'return' - in this case it is a return from some form of death, i.e. a rebirth. Redemption may in some cases be a better term. Snow White is perhaps the best known example (she is trapped in a 100-year sleep before being woken by a prince) but The Frog Prince or Beauty and the Beast are perhaps better (male) examples: in each case the protagonist is trapped in some form (frog/beast) and redeem themselves in some way to escape it (be 'reborn'). A Christmas Carol is perhaps more useful for journalistic purposes: this is the story of a mean business owner who is reborn as a generous benefactor - how that transformation happens is the subject of the story. Again this might be useful for profiles and interviews. Investigations regarding 'poachers turned gamekeepers' (or whistleblower) might also fit this plot.
- 'Comedy' plots are less common in journalism, probably because they do not tend to deal in serious subjects, and/or may be seen to trivialise those. These plots are not comedies in the sense that they are humorous, but in the sense that 'things go wrong' and are then righted. Shakespeare's comedies are the best-known examples of these: stories full of misunderstandings, with a wedding at the end. If you hear a story of a 'comedy of errors' (a phrase which actually comes from an early Shakespeare play) then that's a clue that the comedy plot might work - but be careful it doesn't end up twee.
Bear in mind that one story might have multiple plots. A campaigner might be on a quest but that might involve overcoming one or more monsters along the way. Scrooge's story of rebirth also involves a rags to riches tale and the accompanying tragedy of his broken engagement to Belle, both of which are told as part of the Ghost of Christmas Past section.
Try to be clear which is the bigger story, and which are smaller elements of that (subplots).
Booker identifies 5 stages of a story. These are:
- Anticipation: setting, character and - crucially - 'problem' are introduced. In journalistic narratives the 'problem' is often twofold: investigations often involve a problem with society, but to drive the narrative they might also have a protagonist who tries to solve that problem.
- Dream: we begin exploring/solving the problem, this part is a 'dream' because it tends to be relatively smooth and satisfying (we are getting answers to the problems set out at the start)
- Frustration: we hit more problems. It may well be bigger and more complex than we thought, or initial solutions lead to new problems.
- Nightmare: this is the 'final battle' of fiction narratives, but in journalism we can rarely count on one of these unless the story has already reached its end. 'After the event' stories such as those exploring the fall of Carillion would, however, have a 'nightmare' stage when the company collapses. A better term is climax, when things come to a head.
- Miraculous Escape/Redemption/Achievement of the Prize or (in the case of Tragedy) the Hero's Destruction. Again, in journalism we are unlikely to have this unless it is 'after the event', e.g. a story of a campaign which is already successful. A better term for reporting, then, is resolution/coda. Typically this is an ending which looks ahead to what happens next, either for the issue as a whole (there is an inquest due to take place, or police have provided a quote in response to the investigation), or for one of the people involved (end on a quote about their feelings now, or what they plan to do next).
Let's look at these in relation to 8,000 Holes:
- Anticipation: in 8,000 Holes I begin with Jack Binstead (character) and his nurse's question ('problem') about nominating him for the olympic torch relay (setting).
- Dream: we go on to explain how the torch relay worked, the promises made, etc.
- Frustration: but there's a problem - we keep finding evidence of torch relay places being given to executives, failing to keep the promises made
- Nightmare: you could argue that this is when the sponsors involved respond to the accusations given - but that comes around halfway through the story - or perhaps it is instead the reactions of politicians calling for action. But perhaps the climactic paragraph returns us to Jack, and a description that might indeed be classified as his nightmare, listing all the executives carrying the torch on just the one day he would have been.
- Resolution/coda: here we end with a summary that contrasts the promises against the reality - a factual and unsatisfactory resolution - before a more personal coda: a torchbearer who "thinks that the handling of torchbearer places by sponsors and LOCOG has damaged the experience of carrying the torch." It is not a happy ending, but we have reached our destination.
Actually, the story uses those stages more than once, and you can see narrative arcs within each subplot. For example, the section on the sponsors has its own nightmare climax and resolution before moving on to the next section. Likewise the initial problem of 'becoming a torchbearer' reaches a resolution early on (he doesn't), but that leads to the next problem (what happened to his place and those of 7,999 others), and so on.
Now let's look at those parts in more detail with examples and techniques from other stories:
A very common technique in longer features is to start with a person. Typically that person is the entry point into the bigger issue or theme you are exploring, and after a few paragraphs you 'pan out' to 'reveal' the reason why you're talking so much about this person.
Here are some examples:
We know that David Clapson was actively searching for work when he died because a pile of CVs he had just printed out was found a few metres from his body. The last time he spoke to his sister, a few days before he died, he told her he was waiting to hear back about an application he had made to the supermarket chain Lidl.
The reveal (par 4): "The circumstances of Clapson's death have been scrutinised by many of the groups campaigning for a reform of the government's increasingly punitive (or rigorous"
Jonny Jacobsen: The Big Issue: a hand up from the streets
Noel Cullinane, 50, is Birmingham born and bred.
"Before I was on The Big Issue, I was on the canals and a soldier in the army."
The reveal (par 8, but they're short pars!): "for Noel, and hundreds like him across the country, The Big Issue is a lifeline.""
Yemisi Akinbobola, Paul Bradshaw and Ogechi Ekeanyawu: Follow the Money
It is January 2014.
Among a group of about 30 young boys, some as young as 12, are Ebuka Ogbuehi and Joel Izeh from Lagos. They are about to board a boat at Calabar seaport in southeast Nigeria, going to neighbouring Cameroon. With them are two football coaches — one known to the boys as their coach, Emma (pronounced Ima) — along with a nurse, a dry cleaner and Mr Eric Fred Toumi: a football agent.
In this case the reveal doesn't come until 'chapter 2', 'Player trafficking' which begins "According to a 2013 study conducted by Paris-based charity Foot Solidaire, about 15,000 young boys travel to Europe and other countries from West Africa each year." This is because the story of the boys' experience is compelling enough to carry the reader without any reference to the wider world, for that length of time. But an alternative approach would break off from their story and return to it later, as a technique to make us read the more factual background to the issue while we wait to find out the fate of the boys and agent.
FT Investigation: How China bought its way into Cambodia
"In Cambodia’s Chinese business community, “Big Brother Fu” is a name to be reckoned with. A former officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army, his thickset build and parade-ground voice reinforce the authority suggested by his nickname. But his physical bearing pales next to the heft of his political connections. Few, if any, foreign investors in this small but strategically important Southeast Asian nation enjoy access as favoured as that of Fu Xianting."
Franzi Baehrle: Behind the Big Issue (project)
Julian must have been selling quite a lot of magazines during the twelve years he’s been working as a vendor in Birmingham, on and off. Even more people passed by, for various reasons: Some don’t have the time to stop or simply don’t want to purchase a magazine in general, others worry about where their money is actually going or were put off by a certain behavior.
The reveal: actually this story would be improved with one. It is partly implicit in the project title ('Behind the Big Issue') - he is one of a number of people profiled by the feature. But this could also be done with a standfirst/introduction ("We take a look at...") or a bridging paragraph ("Julian is one of a 5,000 people who sell The Big Issue across the UK...").
A story moves particularly quickly when it begins with that person performing some sort of action. This might be talking (to you, or a colleague or friend); it might be remembering, cooking, or performing some sort of action related to their job.
A good example is The lawyer who takes the cases no one wants - he drives:
Two or three times a month, Tom Giles says goodbye to his wife and three children at their home in Abingdon, and drives north, through Oxfordshire, to Campsfield House immigration detention centre.
Notably, this description of his driving allows the sentence to also establish a setting (see below):
This is Tory heartland — rich fields, manicured villages, 4x4s. Campsfield sits at the end of a long country lane, opposite Oxford airport’s private jets and training planes. On the constituency map it is perched at the end of a Tory promontory: David Cameron’s Witney constituency flows down one side, Boris Johnson’s former fiefdom of Henley down the other.
In this technique, although people typically still kick off the story, the setting takes on a significant role.
Rustam Qobil, BBC: Waiting for the sea:
Khojabay is a fisherman who lives in a desert.
Almost everyone in his village used to fish for a living but in the 1970s the fish died, and the sea began to dry up.
Steadily, over the past 40 years, around 60,000 sq km of water, in places 40m deep, has evaporated into thin air.
The Aral Sea, in Central Asia, used to be the fourth largest lake in the world, after the Caspian Sea, and Lakes Superior and Victoria. Now barely 10% of it is left.
Note that this works because the setting itself and the changes it is going through is the story, and is itself a 'character' of sorts.
Tim Urban: From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story:
On the morning of Saturday, August 2nd, I got in a taxi in Erbil, the regional capital of Kurdish Iraq, and asked the driver to take me to the Khazir refugee camp.
This was a scary-ish thing to do.
The “scary” part is a result of the fact that the Khazir camp is outside of the borders of the somewhat autonomous Kurdish region, one of the only secure parts of the country.
Again, we still have a protagonist (the reporter, and the driver is there too) but the setting is what we remember. It is the source of fear - peril - in this intro, which immediately gives us a problem: will the protagonist stay safe?
Khadija Sharife: Trade secrets: Coca-Cola’s hidden formula for avoiding taxes
The hotel door was the dividing line: inside, a first world fantasy of starched uniforms, low voices, and crisp cool air; outside, color and heat, vendors selling knickers, groundnuts and sunglasses along cracked sidewalks. I sat atop my father’s shoulders, holding his ears, taking in this snapshot of Lusaka in the late 1980s. Zambia was a country in the throes of hunger riots caused by massive reduction in the public budget, a chain reaction that engulfed most of Africa during a period known as the “lost decade.” One country toppled after another like a game of dominos playing to the rules of the Washington Consensus. My father was on the board of a Gulf development bank, assisting–or so they were under the impression–efforts to alleviate poverty in various African countries. The doors between the inside and outside of the Lusaka hotel where we stayed were as much symbolic as they were tangible; made of money, race and social class. But the inside and outside had something in common: Coca-Cola, whether dragged by vendors on small carts or poured with a flourish in swanky restaurants.
Those first few words do so much work: The hotel door was the dividing line introduces both a setting and a problem - dividing line between what?
This approach is also a good example of a setting as a metaphor, often used when the story is about social divisions that are mirrored in the settings, or system complexity mirrored in an architecture (you might even read it being described as like an Escher print).
If your story involves a striking or intriguing detail, that might provide a starting point. Here's an example from The children, the hidden homeless and the women who have suffered domestic violence - these are the stories from inside a Manchester foodbank in 2018:
"A tiny pair of shoes, along with nappies for a newborn, sit on shelves in the storeroom of the Manchester Central foodbank.
"The larder is well-organised and well-stocked with all kinds of household provisions.""
This can be used as metonomy or synecdoche - where part of something represents the whole - or as metaphor: for example a complex toy might act as a metaphor for the system you are trying to investigate.
If you start in this way the implicit promise is that at some point the meaning of this detail will be made clear. In the story above, for example, the next line is "It’s testimony not just to the generosity of ordinary Mancunians, but the surge in demand for emergency help." - so the reader's curiosity is quickly satisfied. Leave it too long and you risk the reader becoming frustrated, and/or doubting that you had a point in focusing on that detail.
The cliched version of this is the "child's teddy bear" of war reporting, notoriously satirised in the newsroom sitcom Drop The Dead Donkey
When a viral challenge raised a huge sum to fight a little-understood disease, the charity that got the money was overwhelmed. As the first breakdown of spending emerges, David Cox asks what happened next — and what it means for patients
This is actually the standfirst to this story, but it establishes the problem and the character who will pursue the quest (mystery, to be specific).
Notably, the first paragraph of the story proper then reverts to other techniques around character, setting and a problem:
t the ALS Association (ALSA) headquarters in Washington DC, Carrie Munk vividly remembers the phone call that first alerted her to the ice bucket challenge. “It was the first week of August and I was at an off-site meeting,” says Munk, ALSA’s chief communications officer. “I picked up the phone and it was the executive of our centre in Massachusetts. He said, ‘You all need to be aware that something big is happening.’ So we quickly checked our fundraising figures, and out of nowhere there was about a $50,000 increase on where we’d been the previous year.”
Similar to the question approach, this sets out a problem more implicitly, rather than explicitly raising a question.
Lena Groeger, ProPublica: Cruise Control:
For more than 22 million passengers each year, a cruise is a dream vacation, an all-inclusive journey of fun and luxury, a chance to simply relax.
But for hundreds of people, the reality is far from the dream. Last year over 1,700 passengers and crew members fell sick from gastrointestinal illnesses like norovirus. Since 2012 at least seven children have drowned or nearly drowned in cruise ship pools that rarely have full-time lifeguards. This year, a 21-year-old college student fell overboard and was never found -- one of at least two dozen incidents in the last two years in which cruise passengers or crew have gone overboard, according to media reports.
Note the hook-and-twist approach: the first paragraph establishes something 'good', and we already know - expect - as readers that this idyllic scene is going to be disrupted.
That expectation is fulfilled in the second par: 'But'.
What is important here is that the 'but' is factual and concrete: 1700 people, not just 'many people'. And it becomes increasingly concrete: the facts move quickly from those 1700 people to "seven children" and "a 21-year-old college student".
That concreteness is vital: it establishes that the reporter has gone out and done the work. If it was vague and general we immediately create a seed of doubt: is this just someone skirting around a subject that they haven't actually really investigated?
It makes an implicit promise: here is the big picture - very soon we'll break that down into more specifics.
More common in news stories than longer features, this approach tends to lead on a key fact in your investigation, with the phrase 'an investigation has revealed' or 'figures have revealed' or 'documents have revealed'. For example:
Bankrupts enjoy 'lavish lifestyles'
Criminals and dishonest debtors are exploiting weaknesses in the bankruptcy system to keep hold of their assets and wealth, a BBC investigation has revealed.
This then establishes a 'hook' for the reader to find out more about this revelation: the story typically then goes on to provide a list of examples, before going deeper into specifics relating to particular individuals or cases.
Notably, this approach focuses more on the revelatory fact than perhaps the deeper complexity surrounding it; the inverted pyramid format that it relies on assumes an impatience on the part of the reader, guaranteeing the most important details will come first and we can abandon reading without worrying that we have missed those. The advantage of this approach - the reader will get the most important information - is also its weakness: readers might be more likely to read superficially.
In contrast, the other approaches detailed above take the reader's patience for granted, sometimes burying more important information lower in the story. The advantage is that this encourages deeper engagement; the disadvantage is that you risk readers turning off because they are frustrated or bored at not getting to the story's key point quickly enough. Negotiating these tensions is part of the editorial art.
Once you've started your story, to maintain interest it may help to organise subsequent parts into chapters or 'scenes'.
How you do this depends on the nature of the story. Here are some suggestions:
- Chronology: the simplest approach is to organise your story chronologically, and use dates for each chapter, like a diary. This is quite dry, however: why should I read a chapter titled 'May 5 2018'? So it's best reserved for dramatic and high profile stories that unfold quickly, where you know the reader is already committed.
- Picaresque (a series of scenes): The Uncatchable tells the story "of how Greece’s most wanted man became a folk hero" (rebirth plot!). The chapter titles give a clue to the approach: 'Boy from the mountain'; 'The game changer' ("a heist more daring than any they had carried out before"); 'Life inside'; 'Inspiration behind bars'; 'On the run' and so on. What we have is a series of scenes - chronological, still, but focused on each story rather than the dates.
- Places: stories that take place in a variety of settings, especially colourful or glamorous ones, might suit a 'jetsetting' approach that takes the reader from place to place. 'Israel, 1970', then 'Moscow, 1990' for example, makes me immediately curious where this story is going to go next! Alternatively, you might have a story that breaks down physically into different locations: this is the case with ProPublica's Cruise Control, which moves from 'The Kitchen' to 'The Pool', and so on, with a labelled diagram of a ship on the left acting as a navigation tool.
- Themes/breaking down the problem: this is probably the most common approach where your story can be broken down thematically by the different problems you need to solve: in Follow the Money chapter 1 follows the stories of the players being trafficked; chapter 2 explores the problem of 'Player trafficking' as a whole; chapter 3 is about 'The complex world of football agents'. 8000 Holes breaks down the middle of the story into what the sponsors did; what LOCOG did; and what the rest did (the start sets the scene; the end rounds it all up). The Inside Housing feature The rise of the housing activist has a navigation that includes 'Start of a movement'; 'Timeline'; 'Meet the activists'; 'At an occupation'; 'Talking tactics'; 'In the line of fire' (climax); and 'What next?' (resolution).
There are two common ways to end a news story: with a quote (typically one that sums it all up, or looks ahead), or with a note about what happens next ("The trial continues; a decision is expected"). A third approach is the 'response' (or lack of), e.g. "The Department for Work and Pensions said they would not comment on individual cases"
The same techniques are often used in longform features, too. Here are some examples:
Congresswoman Matsui and Sen. Blumenthal have advocated making these systems mandatory, calling for the Coast Guard to require all cruise lines to install man-overboard systems on their ships with both an alarm and a video capture feature.
LAPD misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes as minor offenses
Officers said it is widely believed that if their division repeatedly fails to meet targets for crime reduction, their chances of being promoted will be seriously harmed.
The department's focus on numbers has "grown into a dog and pony show, a resource sucker, a cause for fear," said Patrick Barron, who retired as a detective in 2012 after a 30-year career with the LAPD.
"Detectives should be worried about making sure their cases are thoroughly investigated and their victims and witnesses are treated with dignity," he said. "They shouldn't be worried about the statistics."
I looked around his small living room: the messages on the wall reading “If You Believe In Yourself Anything Is Possible” and “Live Every Moment, Laugh Every Day”, the framed pharmacy certificate among all the family photos, the drugs manuals stacked up by the CD rack. That male mingling of personal with professional pride. Tony had a question.
“How can Boots call itself a healthcare company when it’s done this to me?”
The real estate technique fuelling Vancouver's housing market
Mr. Love, the Realtor, said that, while much of what’s going on is indicative of a hot market, he thinks it’s tainting his profession.
“It’s a dangerous type of business – you are opening yourself up to all kinds of issues and problems,” Mr. Love said. "They are committing a sin in our business in that we put our clients first."
In some cases the ending returns to the people, places and/or cases introduced early on - any story threads that have been left unresolved are now resolved. In The lawyer who takes the cases no one wants we return to the person who kicks off the story, and some of his cases:
Even Teresa Gudanaviciene had been forced to go another round with the Home Office. Having been given exceptional case funding, she and Giles fought the decision to deport her, and won their case in the first-tier tribunal. The Home Office refused to accept this decision and challenged it in the upper tribunal – which decided that there had in fact been no error of law and that she could stay. “I spoke to her yesterday,” said Giles, when he told me about it. What did she say? “She just said, ‘I don’t know what to say. Thank you.’”