First Take: a set of events, selected and arranged in a particular order (a plot), recounted from a particular point of view. 

Classical thinkers by and large use the term “narrative” to refer broadly to story-telling, and to one of the four main categories of rhetorical forms of writing (the other three being [1] description, [2] exposition or explanation, and [3] persuasion or argument). In Reading Narrative Journalism, the two main structural elements of this definition—the arrangement of events from a point of view–might be thought of as the core element of what I’m calling the “story-form.”
         

Deeper: Like most terms of this kind, of course, “narrative” has variations and interpretive blind spots.  For one thing, even the sense of narrative I’ve used might well raise the question of how, therefore, we define the limits of what belongs under the label “narrative journalism” itself. Not all forms of reportage are “narrative” in the sense of being built around a continuous or developing plot line. A journalistic story more akin to a classical essay, for example, often orders events discontinuously, while conversely some editorials or op-eds —which we would probably not term reportage–do often tell a story to make their point. Testimonial journalism, likewise, occasionally strings together inset narratives without an external, framing interpretive point of view. Likewise, it is reasonable to ask whether the everyday reporting one sees in newspaper, with a triangle lead, and then a set of background facts often conveyed in an expository way, is itself “narrative” journalism in any meaningful sense.
          Moreover, in much of literary theory, plot and story aren’t always easily distinguished from each other That’s why, in some critics’ view, the term “story” should actually be reserved for all of the events a reader assumes have happened to the characters, even if that material didn’t quite make it into the plot we actually read.  Or, to put this another way, the “story” is the raw material the plot organizes for us in a particular order.  Journalists, as I have said, more often speak of “the story” as an empirical event in the real, or as the element in that event that has news value. But Reading Reportage has reserved the term “narrative” for the two-part rhetorical design described above, and thus—even given its limits–for “narrative journalism” itself.