More than a hundred decontextualized, formalistic paradigms of the narrative process are in existence but little work has been done to apply the insights narrative theory yields to news and journalistic form. This essay offers a narrative theory approach to understanding news as well as journalistic form. The definition adopted for the concept narrative refers to any discourse explicitly structured to communicate a sense of overall meaning to an audience, radier than an effort to chronicle events exactly as they occurred. It is argued that in the era of the professional communicator, in which a premium is placed on sheer information as the end product of mass communication and where those professional norms that tend to move journalism perilously close to stenography are applied, narrative theory forces the acknowledgement that a structuring hand and a shaping sensibility lurks beneath the surface of what may seem to be merely a transparent account of the facts of the day. Moreover, journalistic accounts work to uphold the authority of the narrator/reporter by sharply circumscribing the latitude of the reader. This is done by means of denotative language, an unmistakable focus, and explanations of events that tend to delimit their causes and outcomes, thereby enforcing a single, monolithic view of reality.