In his article `News Time', published in Time & Society in 1995, Allan Bell claims that the narrative structure of news stories deviates considerably from other narrative genres. This paper questions the claim that news stories have a non-chronological time structure, as it raises fundamental questions with respect to comprehension. In doing so, the time and narrative structure of news stories are reanalysed with the aim of relating the overall structure to the function of news stories in their recapitulation of reportable news events. The reanalysis also considers the evaluative aspect of stories, as evaluation appears to affect the temporal organization of the events in narrative.
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