The Evolution of Story: How Time and Modality Affect Visual and Verbal Narratives

Abstract

A majority of Americans distrust the news media due to concerns over comprehensiveness, accuracy, and fairness. Since many interactions between journalists and their subjects last only minutes and can be published within seconds, if not live, research is needed to explore how journalists' understandings of their subjects' narratives evolve over time and how much time is necessary to avoid surface-level coverage. Also, since people are now exposed to more image-based rather than text-based messages, additional research is necessary to explore how the verbal narratives spoken by subjects compare to their nonverbal narratives as captured by news photographers in visual form. Through a longitudinal, interview-based approach, a photojournalist working on a 30-plus-day picture story was interviewed weekly for six weeks over the course of his project to track perceptions of how his subjects' verbal narratives changed. At the conclusion of the project, the photojournalist's subjects were also interviewed to explore how their verbal and nonverbal narratives compared. Informed by literature in role theory, narrative, and visual journalism, the findings explore how news media narratives can be more nuanced and how people shape their visual and verbal narratives consciously and unconsciously. Additional findings suggest that comprehensiveness, accuracy, and fairness are intimately related to interaction duration and that visual narratives can highlight role conformity and conflict in ways not possible through verbal narratives alone.