Truthful or Engaging?

Abstract

Storytelling is hyped as an instrument to attract audiences, but its potential to engage simultaneously makes it a source of criticism and concern. The debate seems stuck between what the profession of journalism is supposed to be about (facts, objectivity, truth-telling), and the way these ideals are threatened by the trend of engaging users. In this article we explore how it is possible that the discussion about journalism and storytelling seems to have made little progress over many decades. The problem, we argue, is that the discussion appears to take place in the same discursive space, but in actuality takes its cues from several distinctive repertoires, which are in themselves coherent and make sense but when played off against each other create false oppositions that do little justice to the arguments made on both sides. We will try to open up and enlarge the discursive space to talk about storytelling in the context of journalism by showing how both terms function differently in seven distinct repertoires. This maneuver should enable us to move forward the analysis, the value, the function, and the conceptual development of journalistic storytelling.

Why Sociocultural Context Matters in the Science of Reading and the Reading of Science: Revisiting the Science Discovery Narrative

“…The universal familiarity of the narrative structure has been noted as a warrant for using stories for communicating and supporting the comprehension of scientific content in texts (e.g., Avraamidou & Osborne, 2009;Murmann & Avraamidou, 2014;Prins, Avraamidou, & Goedhart, 2017), and some empirical work has found that students demonstrate greater conceptual understanding and textual comprehension when information is encased in a narrative structure, such as a scientist's journal (Palincsar & Magnusson, 2001) or a pictorial narrative about human evolution (Browning & Hohenstein, 2015). Psychologists have long cited the power of narrative for recalling information more effectively (e.g., Baddeley, 1994), although some educational scholars have noted the perils of seductive details, which can be difficult to avoid and may sometimes be more engaging than the targeted factual information (Groot Kormelink & Costera Meijer, 2015;Jetton, 1994;Madrazo, 1997;Mayer, 1995;Rice, 2002;Whitebrook, 2001Whitebrook, /2014.…”

Nothing but the Facts?

“…For instance, academics describe balanced reporting as a narrative convention and thus as a form of storytelling. Journalists on the other hand would describe balanced reporting as a verification strategy (Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2015). This repertoire reflects journalists' "passion for truth".…”

Narratives as a mode of research evaluation in citizen science: understanding broader science communication impacts

“…Here we outline the unique characteristics of narrative to support our argument for narrative evaluations. Journalists have long understood the usefulness of narrative in communicating scientific information [Kormelink and Meijer, 2015;Shaffer et al, 2017]. Narratives have distinct communication features: a set of characters developing over the course of the narrative, a plot, a sequence of events, or a temporality with more or less degrees of cause and effect, and a narrator/point of view.…”