Dr. David Dowling, a professor of media, communication, and culture at the University of Iowa School of Journalism, has always had a special passion for narrative journalism.
Created as an alternative to literary journalism, narrative places emphasis on literary storytelling techniques, such as putting focus on character and setting development while reporting on real-world events.
Dowling has observed how the narrative medium has changed with the advent of digital journalism, and how it continues to transform with the growing popularity of multimedia storytelling.
He records his observations and other insights in his 2024 novel News Inc.: Brand and Advocacy Journalism Across Media, an examination of how news companies have branded their narrative pieces through different mediums to reach a wider audience.
Dowling first noticed a change in how narrative journalism is formatted and expressed with Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, a multimedia production by New York Times reporter John Branch.
Detailing the 2012 Tunnel Creek avalanche and its aftermath, Snow Fall changed the trajectory of digital reporting by using audio recordings, interactive graphics, and other features to showcase the survivors’ experiences.
“It was the Star Wars of digital, long-form storytelling,” Dowling said, “It really seemed to inaugurate and establish the main conventions of what journalism was going to look like in the 21st century. And from there, you could just see a crop of other news organizations coming in and going, ‘We’ve got to make our own Snow Fall here.’”
Dowling explained that news companies started converting their “most ambitious and promising stories” into multimedia projects to remain competitive in the journalism industry while changing the industry landscape itself.
The urgency to replicate Snow Fall’s ingenuity and the development and intersection of brand and advocacy journalism inspired Dowling to write News Inc.
“You could see this constellation of stories coming out that were really mimicking and patterning after Snow Fall, and from there, it ebbed and flowed, but really moved into brands,” Dowling said. “Brands really liked that long-form space. They are moving in, and they’re seeing how much engagement that this form can actually encourage from readers.”
With the popularity of Snow Fall came an increase in brand journalism, in which different brands embed themselves into narrative pieces, or the news company advertises itself through its own pieces.
“They [brands] realized that this is better than just a banner ad or a pop-up; that if they could really tell their story as content marketing in a long-form kind of way, they could express their brand values so much deeper and richer than before.”
This transformation has led to many ads not feeling like traditional ads, something Dowling noticed during his research for News Inc.
“I also saw news organizations open their own brand studios in about the mid-2010s,” Dowling explains, “such as T Brand, which is the New York Times’ brand studio. All these corporations, like General Electric and Chanel, started coming in and saying to these news companies, ‘Tell our story. We want to use your New York Times brand, the veneer of prestige and credentialing, that our brands don’t have.’”
In relation to brand journalism’s trajectory within the narrative sphere, Dowling replied, “There’s really no plateau in sight. Other editorial newsrooms wanted to copy Snow Fall, but then what happened was the commercial side of it. These newsrooms discovered it and realized, ‘This is our go-to, this is the way we’re going to tell stories, and this is how we can innovate and get brands out there.’”
Beyond brand journalism was advocacy journalism, also a growing format with a noticeable presence in the narrative world. Nonprofits and NGOs have become increasingly involved in narrative journalism, especially in long-form podcasting, both for financial support and to promote a socially-driven issue.
One example is the Invisible Institute’s narrative podcast You Didn’t See Nothing, a Pulitzer Prize-winning project about Black communities in the Southside of Chicago facing police brutality and violence within their own communities.
“The Invisible Institute is, in some ways, the poster group, as it were, organization for how storytelling has evolved, because they’re really at the very leading edge,” Dowling said.
Dowling explains that the Invisible Institute wasn’t founded with the intention of creating a podcast, but as an archive where victims of police brutality could submit and document evidence to later defend themselves in court.
With support from the Knight Foundation, an organization that funds independent journalism, the archive was transformed into You Didn’t See Nothing and succeeded in both promoting the Invisible Institute and placing an emphasis on the epidemic of police brutality in the United States.
“I start my book by saying that there’s very little difference between brand journalism and advocacy journalism,” Dowling said, “They’re both telling stories and trying to persuade and influence people. One has a financial objective while the other has a social mission, but they’re both more driven towards a goal and a greater sense of urgency than a legacy newsroom."
Dowling’s book also discusses the possible future of brand and advocacy narrative journalism. He points out that audio narrative journalism will continue its ascension into the most popular form of journalism given its current trajectory, but also that advocacy and brand journalism will continue to intersect and expand.
“These things are not going to go away; they’re going to continue to rise.”
Advocacy journalists have also started working more with brand studios, with Dowling highlighting how environmental advocacy groups have partnered with legacy newsrooms’ brand studios to create a joint brand-advocacy project that both promotes the group’s work and supports the brand.
“Community advocacy and branding are really blowing up and they’re not going to stop. Legacy media is going to continue being enriched by brand studios while more and more success comes out of the nonprofit world,” Dowling said.
“As we see nonprofits like the Invisible Institute ascend to unprecedented heights, it really sort of raises the bar for journalistic storytelling. And this is the best and the hardest and the richest kind of journalism that you can produce, period.”