Structured Narratives as a Framework for Journalism: A Work in Progress

Abstract

This paper describes Structured Stories, a platform for producing and consuming journalism as structured narratives based on instantiations of event frames. The event frames are defined using FrameNet and are instantiated as structured events using references to nodes in various knowledge graphs. Structured narratives with recursive, fractal and network characteristics are then assembled from these structured events. The approach requires the direct reporting of journalistic events into structure by untrained reporters, and utilizes a simplified sequential user interface to achieve this. A prototype has been built and published, and is being applied to the reporting of local government journalism to explore editorial aspects of the approach.