News (or what passes for it) is always breaking now, wave after wave surging ceaselessly from the Internet, television, and radio, hitting the battered shore of consciousness—and leaving more and more Americans feeling that they can get along just fine without the lengthy elaborations the next day’s newspaper will bring. To win back readers, newspaper editors have tried almost everything, from color and jazzy graphics to pious "public journalism" promoting civic betterment. But circulation has kept tumbling. Since 1993, even the thick, ad-rich Sunday papers have been losing readers. Now there’s a new remedy: "narrative journalism." It uses some of the techniques of fiction—such as building a central narrative, deploying characters, and setting scenes—to deliver the news in the form of an unfolding drama. Enthusiasts and skeptics debate the merits of this approach in Nieman Reports (Fall 2000), published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The "voice" that the reader "hears" in traditional news stories is bland and impersonal, but it can be made more engaging to readers "without threatening the crucial mission of newspapers," contends Mark Kramer, a professor of journalism at Boston University. Gripping, revealing, and accurate narratives can be crafted, he says, that appeal to readers’ "civic" emotions. In many narrative-minded newspapers these days, news stories often have an anecdotal "lede" (lead), with the point of the story buried in a "nut graf" below. Other, more ambitious narrative news stories, at the risk of seeming pointless, have no explicit point at all. A 15-part series about racial relations in the United States that appeared in the New York Times last June and July concentrated on the stories of many individuals and deliberately avoided drawing any broad conclusions.

Some narrative journalism has proven compelling. Sales of the Philadelphia Inquirer jumped by 20,000 in 1997 when a month-long series by reporter Mark Bowden appeared, reconstructing in dramatic detail the battle four years earlier in which 18 U.S. soldiers died in Mogadishu, Somalia. Enhanced with audio and video clips on the Inquirer’s Web site, the series drew increasing "hits" each day—until the daily number reached 40,000, causing a server to crash.

Successful narrative journalism has even been done on tight daily deadlines. At Florida’s St. Petersburg Times, after months of background research, Thomas French and two other reporters covered a murder trial by turning out narrative "chapters" in the continuing saga each day—chapters in which the day’s "news" was disclosed not right away, as it would be in a traditional news account, but only gradually, as it would be in a novel. "The verdict itself," French notes, "was revealed on the third jump page, in the 112th paragraph." Two readers complained, but hundreds of others lauded the unusual coverage.

The news does not always lend itself to narrative journalism, however, and adding a dollop of narrative to news stories does not necessarily make them more engaging. Indeed, it can make them less useful, former Washington Post columnist Nicholas von Hoffman points out in the New York Observer (Oct. 16, 2000). The New York Times, he complains, "is now larded with meandering, verbose stories" with "longway-around-the-barn" human-interest leads.