Tracing the narrativity of National Geographic feature articles in the light of evolving media landscapes

Abstract

This article seeks to trace the narrativization of the genre feature article as published in the National Geographic magazine over the past 100 years. I base my argumentation on the observation that image-caption-clusters have gained remarkable prominence in perception as they today often cover the entire layout space of a double-page, when they often appeared together with running text on a 1915 spread. Given that narrativization has always been a core popularization strategy of the magazine’s journalistic practices, and is thus likely to be expected by its audience, the question arises whether perceptually prominent image-caption-clusters have increased in their degree of narrativity. In order to explore this question, I establish an interdisciplinary framework for a media linguistic analysis of literary journalism inspired by theorization in linguistics, literary studies, narratology and its cognitive branches. I proceed by exploring a corpus of altogether 15 National Geographic print feature articles (and their 304 image-caption-clusters) published in 1915, 1965, and 2015. I conclude this paper with a discussion of my findings. In particular, I draw on the framework of audience design and outline five main aspects magazine editors are at least likely to consider when making assumptions about their audience’s genre expectations.